[clean-list] Re: Newbie here...

Siegfried Gonzi siegfried.gonzi@kfunigraz.ac.at
Fri, 24 Aug 2001 15:56:22 +0200


Royi Eltink royi@eastsite.nl wrote:

> - Is Clean better than Perl or C? (and why)

There is no programming language which is best. I know a guy who swears he is at most productive with Assembler. On the other side I have been never understood what people leads when they use Perl
or C. The pointer arithmetic in C is such an insane thing I cannot express. There is absolutely no sign that a programmer is a good programmer when he understands pointers. A programming language
should help you solving problems. Maybe every second computer-science student is proud of claiming: "I know pointers". Good so, every black in Africa will be happy when he meets a computer guy and
get as answer: "I do not have food for you but I know everything about pointers".

Often not the language is crucial but the packages are. If you are linguist maybe you get an appropiate Perl-package for you tasks. So, people are often messing about with Perl or Python because
they encounter a huge library.

Clean offers you also a very huge library (e.g. GUIs, matrix-library,...). And the Clean development environment is one of the zippiest IDEs. There is nothing such as linking and compiling. You
start your program always with compiled speed. And the compiler is  very efficient. Have you ever tried to make a standalone with C on the Mac for example? This is maybe more ackward than pointer
arithmetic...

Believe me you will appreciate a live without pointers and a live without malloc. And the best: If you insist you can force Clean  to use arrays as strict and therefore there is absolutely no need
for garbage collection (destructive update and speed close to C). After 50 years of computer-sciences (if we discard the history until Zuse) I refuse to use "malloc" whenever possible. People go
to the hospital and expect state-of-the-art medicine. But people go to the programmer and expect that he uses "malloc". Maybe I am in the wrong film.


> - What looks the famous "HelloWorld!" program like?

module hello
import StdEnv

Start = "Hello world"

> - Are there also smaller, beginners, tutorials on the net, instead the
ones found from KUN? (its too large to print out and read relaxed, while
waiting for the train ^_^)

a) First it is a good sign that you go by train and not by car.

b) I assure you Clean's speed comes close to C/C++ (I mention this because people often compare a new language to C)
bb) Therefore you can concentrate on the essential Clean  constructs

c) This tutorial will put you through the first days:

  http://www.deene.ufu.br/clean/clean1.html


S. Gonzi
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