Re: Best Procedural Language?

On 8/1/06, Christopher Browne <cbbrowne(at)acm(dot)org> wrote:
> 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.

my take:
C:
you can probably get by without doing any C. Most (but not quite all)
of things you would do via C is exposed in libraries. One thing you
can do with C for example is invoke a function via its oid and
manually supplying parameters to make callbacks for proceures. you
can also dump core on your backend. good luck!

pl/pgsql:
you do not know postgresql if you do not know pl/pgsql. period. ideal
for data processing and all sorts of things. all queries are first
class in the code (except for dynamic sql), which in my estimation
cuts code size, defect rate, and development time about 75% for
typical database type stuff. just be warned, after you learn it you
will never want to use another database ever again, i'm not kiddig.

pl/perl, etc:
not much to add beyond what chris browe said: great for text
processing or library support.

merlin