[REBOL] Re: Rebol vs PHP
From: rebol:techscribe at: 25-Jan-2001 1:03
Hi Justin, Graham,
Graham Chiu wrote:
> I don't PHP, but I would have thought that PHP being an
> Apache module would be faster, and less memory/resource
> intensive.
It probably depends on what exactly you are doing. My experience with
PHP is it uses up a lot of memory. I had to split some scripts up into
multiple files, because I was getting an "Out of memory" message on a
box that has 512MB RAM or more.
> The other point is whether you really want to use Access
> databases to web serve information. It's intended use is as
> a desktop database.
That's a very good point. There are plenty of very stable, commercial
quality Open Source (or at least free) databases out there that are far
better suited for an online application. Examples: MySQL, Interbase,
FreeBase, and many more.
PHP's object implementation is a little weird (look at the trouble you
can get yourself into if you use the PHP XML parser from within an
object, or if you try to pass the XML parser functions defined in a
derived object).
Iterating over associative arrays also isn't always fun. While the
syntax looks simple enough:
while ( list($key, $value) = each ($a_array) {
do_something($key, $value);
}
you actually get each value listed twice: once in assoication with a key
that is the index of the value, and a second time with a key that is the
key you associated with the value. That's kind of relevant when you want
to associate the fieldnames with the values stored in the fields.
REBOL does not have the problems I just listed. You can learn REBOL much
faster because the REBOL shell is interactive. You can instantly test
out ideas for the same reason. REBOL has better error trapping and
debugging support. The wealth of datatypes supported by REBOL and its
parametric polymorphism make it alot easier to implement code that works
as expected. Just compare the code needed under PHP to send an email
message, and compare it to the simple REBOL code that you can enter in
the REBOL shell
>> send [rebol-list--rebol--com] "Hi guys, really great programming language."
I find that REBOL enables me to express my intentions much faster and
more precisely than PHP. If I'm expected to deliver PHP code, I usually
prefer to write REBOL functions that will generate the PHP code, and
then express my code in REBOL, or write a small dialect and implement a
REBOL compiler that generates the appropriate REBOL code based on the
code I write in my dialect. One reason for this approach is that PHP has
many more syntactic gotchas then REBOL (the obligatory $ sign at the
beginning of variables, which is occassionally forgotten, the obligatory
-> operator to access object functions and variables, which
occassionally ends up being -, the obligatory ; at the end of each
statement, which is occassionally forgotten, it slows you down,
especially together with PHP's very terse error messages.)
In short, PHP is quite cool, REBOL is great. Sometimes you have to use
PHP, unless you have access to REBOL/Command, because /Core has no
built-in support for databases. But if you were planning to use Access,
then quite possible you don't have a database intensive aplication in
mind, and using REBOL plain text files will be sufficeint to store your
data. Perhaps something as simple as this
REBOL []
address-book: [
"Peter" "Smith" "555 5551212" "345 N. Nowhere Rd." "Noc Ity" "NO
State"
"Barbara" "Jones" "111 121 5555" "543 S. Somewhere Rd." "Somec Ity"
Same State
]
print [<HTML><HEAD></HEAD><BODY>]
print <table>
foreach [first-name last-name phone address city state] address-book [
print [<tr><td>]
print [first-name last-name phone address city state]
print [</tr></td>]
]
print </table>
print [</BODY></HEAD></HTML>]
will do?
Hope this helps,
Elan
