Re: Baby X is bor nagain

On Mon, 17 Jun 2024 15:23:55 +0200
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:

I use Python rather than C because for
PC code, that can often involve files, text manipulation, networking,
and various data structures, the Python code is at least an order of
magnitude shorter and faster to write.  When I see the amount of
faffing around in order to read and parse a file consisting of a list
of integers, I find it amazing that anyone would actively choose C
for the task (unless it is for the fun of it).
>

The faffing (what does it mean, BTW ?) is caused by unrealistic
requirements. More specifically, by requirements of (A) to support
arbitrary line length (B) to process file line by line. Drop just one
of those requirements and everything become quite simple.
[O.T.]
That despite the fact that fgets() API is designed rather badly -
return value is much less useful that it can easily be. It would be
interesting to find out who was responsible.
[/O.T.]

For task like that Python could indeed be several times shorter, but
only if you wrote your python script exclusively for yourself, cutting
all corners, like not providing short help for user, not testing that
input format matches expectations and most importantly not reporting
input format problems in potentially useful manner.
OTOH, if we write our utility in more "anal" manner, as we should if
we expect it to be used by other people or by ourselves long time after
it was written (in my age, couple of months is long enough and I am not
that much older than you) then code size difference between python and
C variants will be much smaller, probably factor of 2 or so.

W.r.t. faster to code, it very strongly depends on familiarity.
You didn't do that sort of tasks in 'C' since your school days, right?
Or ever? And you are doing them in Python quite regularly? Then that is
much bigger reason for the difference than the language itself.
Now, for more complicated tasks Python, as the language, and even more
importantly, Python as a massive set of useful libraries could have
very big productivity advantage over 'C'. But it does not apply to very
simple thing like reading numbers from text file.

In the real world, I wrote utility akin to that less than two years ago.
It converted big matrices from space delimited text to Matlab v4 .mat
format. Why did I do it? Because while both Matlab and Gnu Octave are
capable of reading text files like those, but they are quite slow doing
so. With huge files that I was using at the moment, it became
uncomfortable.
I wrote it in 'C' (or was it C-style C++ ? I don't remember) mostly
because I knew how to produce v4 .mat files in C. If I were doing it in
Python, I'd have to learn how to do it in Python and at the end it
would have taken me more time rather than less. I didn't even came to
the point of evaluating whether speed of python's functions for parsing
text was sufficient for my needs.