Re: Informix Evaluation

>> Well, INFORMIX online is a very fast database server. ESQL-C allows to put >> monster which allows to write buggy, sluggish, informixish standard >> apllications in no time while driving you crazy if you want more. >> >> Not too helpful, but treu :-) > >Not treu (or even true)! >I4GL may not be God's gift to programming, but it's got to be wayyyy more >productive than C! It seems to me to be neither buggy (tho there are >bugs) nor sluggish. > >If you want to produce buggy code I'd pick C over a 4GL any day. > >--------------------------------------,------------------------------------- >Kerry Sainsbury, kerry@kcbbs.gen.nz | THE INFORMIX FAQ Is this a comment on your C coding ability, Kerry? :) IMHO, it is far easier to write incomprehensible C than Informix 4GL. I wrote 10K lines of C++/Versant (an OODB) for one project. Could have done the same thing in 2K lines of 4GL. I'm very careful in coding in C (or C++) not to get too clever in what I am doing; some poor maintenance programmer (probably me) will have to read/alter the code one day. C's bad rep comes from "clever" programmers, frequently academics, who think it is a statement of how superior their intellect is to write code that no-one else can understand. (Told one that if he worked for me and wrote code like that, I'd fire him. I was doing a postgrad course there at the time :) ). Inherently, 4GL probably does have more bugs than C. But it's far less easy to create *new* ones. And it's a lot easier/faster to create or modify apps. As for speed, most databases are i/o bound rather than compute bound so any speed improvement by using C is probably marginal. C/C++ is great for writing code to interface with physical devices (modems, serial devices such as load cells, scales, bar code raders etc) but 4GL is better for DBMS apps. Peter Wiley