| This thesis analyses many aspects of UNIX interpreted scripting languages and compares them against more traditional programming methods. The languages compared in this thesis include Tcl, Java, Perl and Python with emphasis on Tcl and Java. Various approaches, including computational and graphical, are used for the evaluation process. Methods used in the comparison of the interpreted languages include ease of use, readability, understandability and overall robustness.;The results of the experiments clearly demonstrate a significant speed advantage in terms of computational execution speed for compiled languages. In all computational cases, the interpreted language being evaluated was slower than the compiled C counterpart. It was determined through experimentation that Tcl is 356.53 times slower, Perl is 34.72 times slower, Python is 319.36 times slower and Java is 6.97 times slower than compiled C. The same results were also observed in the graphical phase of analysis, but to a much lesser degree. It was determined through experimentation that Tk is 7.78 times slower, Stdwin is 11.88 times slower, AWT is 9.88 times slower, OSF/Motif is 1.62 times slower, Athena 2D is 0.87 times slower, Athena 3D is 0.77 times slower, and Lesstif is 2.19 times slower than the XView toolkit. |
