[oclug] Programming wars -- great fun.

[Joe Burpee]

"Michael P. Soulier" wrote:
>     I know Perl better, so my initial answer was Perl. :) Then I thought, "how
> would I do this in C?"

I found myself in a similar situation Mike.  Did a quick Perl solution;
that
was just *way* too easy.  I noticed you were already doing C, and Python
was also taken.  Not hard to see what languages would win the tests for
size, speed and prettiness.

After a while I settled on C++; I assumed nobody (in their right mind)
would prefer it for this task.  Probably a loser in all 3 categories, so
I thought it would be fun to try.

I figured I could at least compensate for losing Perl's flexibility by
using some of the STL container classes.  This also helped prevent me
from "cheating" by writing basically C code with a .cc suffix.  But,
based on limited experience with another implementation of STL, I
expected the thing to be really slow.

I was surprised.  After minor tuning, the thing ran consistently 30-40%
faster than the regular `tree' program.  Not really a fair comparison,
but an interesting indicator anyway.  I ended up quite impressed with
g++; my preconceived notions were probably similar to some of the
irrational prejudice against Perl.

[Thanks and congratulations to Vic, for taking what started out as
another pointless language feud, and turning it into a very pleasant
War.]

Joe