Re: Perl vs. PHP

[Christopher R. Jones]

I don't have a whole lot of experience but for every project I have done, I 
asked if Perl was available on the WEB server and it has always been 
available.  The WEB server administrator did not have to do any 
thing.  Then I asked if MySQL was available and about half the time it was 
and in the other cases, I got the System Admin to install MySQL with no 
problems.  All the WEB servers I have worked on have C compiler but not all 
have C++.  PHP is not universally available.  I am not sure if PHP can be 
installed for all WEB servers.  Half my projects have been with Netscape 
Enterprise server.

I have used Perl for WEB page generation because there is a lot of user 
help available and because there are many modules specifically for HTML 
generation.  I use C programs for number crunching.  Perl CGI scripts call 
the C programs passing the correct arguements and the C programs return the 
results.  When you need to solve linear system equations that are 40 x 864, 
C is a good choice.  I am not sure that you can call executables from a PHP 
script and use the returned results to generate the HTML.


Christopher R. Jones, P.Eng.
14 Oneida Avenue
Toronto, Ontario M5J 2E3
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Email cj@stripped