survey

[beliavsky at aol.com]

Dave Zhu wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> Is there any survey on scripting languages? I would
> like to get information on several scripting languages
> including Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl, etc.

The Language Shootout at http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ has code
samples in many languages, both interpreted and compiled, including the
ones you mentioned. Don't trust the lines-of-code statistics, though --
the LOC measure is wrongly shown as zero for several codes, and comment
lines are counted, so that languages with programmers who use more
comments are penalized.

You can obtain the paper "Are Scripting Languages Any Good? A
Validation of Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl against C, C++, and Java." by
Prechelt at http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~prechelt/Biblio/ -- his answer
is "yes".