Re: Best Procedural Language?

Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing when "Carlo Stonebanks" <cstonebanks(at)nissenfasteners(dot)com> wrote:
> I am interested in finding out a "non-religious" answer to which
> procedural language has the richest and most robust implementation
> for Postgres. C is at the bottom of my list because of how much
> damage runaway code can cause. I also would like a solution which is
> platorm-independent; we develop on Windows but may deploy on Linux.

You mean for implementing stored procedures?

I'd say that the answer varies depending on what the stored proc is
for.

- If it needs to do "text munging," then one of {Perl|Python|Tcl} seem
appropriate; they draw in big libraries of text munging code

- If you're writing code that selects data from various tables based
on the inputs, then pl/pgsql tends to be the natural answer

- C is needed when you need deep engine access that can't be gotten
any other way

- Untrusted Perl/Tcl are nifty if you need access to the rich sets of
external libraries

- If you have some code in Java that you'd want to run in the DB
server, then one of the pl/Java systems may be for you

It doesn't seem overly flameworthy to me.

Except for the cases where you *must* use C, you can usually
accomplish things in the "wrong" language, but there are likely to be
drawbacks...

- Doing funky string munging using the SQL functions available in
pl/pgsql is likely to be painful;

- Doing a lot of DB manipulation in pl/Perl or pl/Tcl or such
requires having an extra level of function manipulations that
won't be as natural as straight pl/pgsql.
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http://linuxdatabases.info/info/postgresql.html
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A: No, they can also be used with symbolics (Fig.18).
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