Re: Tcl/Lisp/Python: A "User" point of view

Reimer Behrends (behrends@buran.fb10.tu-berlin.de)
29 Sep 1994 23:22:20 GMT

John Ousterhout (ouster@tcl.eng.sun.com) wrote:
: In article <36cafa$5ue@btree.brooktree.com>, mdimeo@brooktree.com (Matt DiMeo) writes:
[Bogus example deleted]

: I'm getting a little weary of the discussion of O(1) vs. O(n). There are
: many things in Tcl worthy of criticism, I'm sure, but please don't criticize
: list append time until you've tried the "lappend" command.

True enough. However, as soon as you start to index the list produced thus,
Tcl is several 100 times slower than both python and perl. And that's where
the real problem lies. For indexing is a lot more common than producing
lists in such a stupid way as indicated.

Now I don't want to belittle Tcl. It is a fine language for embedding, and
most often the best one for this particular purpose. But it is impractical
to use Tcl for complex programming (or most things involving structured
data). I'd choose python for such a purpose.

Reimer Behrends