Once upon a midnight dreary, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner had spoken clearly:
>It was thus said that the Great Sellam Ismail once stated:
>>
>> On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Daniel A. Seagraves wrote:
>>
>> > "You should use strings instead of integers. You can put bigger
numbers in
>> > a string."
>
> Technically, that is correct (to a point). I have a program that
>calculates e to some insane precision (based upon the work done by Woz on
>the Apple ][ and published in Byte magazine) and the number could be
>considered stored in a string.
I disagree... this isn't correct _to a point_... this is correct. Of
course, it does depend on the type of job you're doing, but just because
it's different doesn't mean it's wrong, or slow.
*All* numbers are stored as strings when programming in Perl. There's no
worry for large number variables, and despite the math functions are a
little slower than other languages, there's no conversion overhead for when
you're printing those numbers out. As Perl is designed for information
extraction and reporting, numbers being stored as a string is a *plus*.
I'll *never* program in plain ol' Basic again when I need a quickie proggy
to convert a CSV file or somesuch... I can finish a job in 1/3 the time
with Perl, have it execute a little faster, and a lower incidence of errors
(which are easier to find, BTW....)
Just my NSHO,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger --- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers
Recycling is good, right??? Ok, so I'll recycle an old .sig.
If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead
disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.
Received on Fri Apr 09 1999 - 14:21:47 BST