language interpreters/ interpreted languages weaknesses?

[William Tanksley]

On Wed, 01 Sep 1999 02:42:13 GMT, Mr Kelvin Lee wrote:
>Hi,

>The main weakness I hear about language interpreters/ interpreted
>languages (btw.. is that the same thing?) is that they are slow(?)..

You'll need to define your criterion for 'slow'.  That sounds Clintonian,
but it's true -- different projects have different needs.  For heavy
numeric work, Python might wind up being the fastest language available to
you because of NumPy (although I can't imagine the circumstances).

The usual meaning of "slow" is that they do common tasks, such as function
calls, much more slowly than the machine could do them.  Python certainly
has that particular weakness.

For the rest of your post, I'm going to assume that when you say
"interpreted" you mean "dynamic".

>is this because of the way they handle (data) variables?

No, there are many reasons -- the main one is that they have so much more
to do at runtime.  This makes things you do naturally in a static language
slow -- but it makes many more things _possible_, where before they would
have taken a LONG time to develop and be very buggy.

>Are there any other major weaknesses of interpreted languages over
>conventional languages such as C, C++, Ada etc.?

Yes, and vice versa.

Dynamic languages are capable of much less compiler optimization, so
they're slower.  They're also capable of doing much more useful work per
word of code, so they wind up doing the job faster.

>What are the most popular interpreted languages around?

Perl, Python, Common Lisp, CAML, Forth...

>Thanks,
>
>--
>Regards,
>
>KL.
>
>
>Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
>Share what you know. Learn what you don't.


-- 
-William "Billy" Tanksley