On 26/10/2024 02:58, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
> PHP is fair, but it's not really a good DB
>   editing lang.

You can say that again. Faced with preparing a huge Comma delimited data
set from a very large database PHP simply died a death

I wrote that bit in C.

--
If I had all the money I've spent on drink...
...I'd spend it on drink.

Sir Henry (at Rawlinson's End)

On 26/10/2024 05:38, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2024-10-25, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 25 Oct 2024 17:32:03 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> On 2024-10-25, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Being forced to be an Ada programmer - it'd be like one of those
>>>> legendary Greek tortures of hell ...
>>>
>>> Another one is being forced to maintain payroll programs forever.
>>
>> My personal hell is database programming. Gods know I've done enough of it
>> but it always feels like shoveling shit against the tide.
>
> I'm proud to say that in 50 years of programming I've managed
> to never go near a DBMS.
>
It was people like you who ensured that in the end I did.

--
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere,
diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
― Groucho Marx

On Sat, 26 Oct 2024, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2024-10-25, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>
>> Irrelevant. The question was if the economy is zero sum or not. That is
>> pure nonsense and a child can realize it when looking at the population
>> increase from the time of jesus until now.
>
> I take it you're a climate change denier, then.

Nope. I am climate rationalist. Are you a climate hysteric?

On Fri, 25 Oct 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 25/10/2024 21:12, D wrote:
>> Today’s economic indicators support the notion that the economy is not a
>> zero-sum game.
>
> D FFS I never claimed economies were a zero sum game, I claimed that that is
> *how socialists view it*.
> Why not read what I wrote and respond to that, instead of engaging in a
> diatribe that actually agrees with me.

See previous message.

In alt.folklore.computers rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
>
> It does work well. I was going to look into SpatiaLite but never got
> around to it. Supposedly the syntax is similar to PostGIS, which would be
> nice.

It has a very kludgy syntax for the KNN operation. Last time I looked anyway.
Postgis has the <> operator. I use that a lot.

On 2024-10-26, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 26/10/2024 02:58, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>> PHP is fair, but it's not really a good DB
>>   editing lang.
>
> You can say that again. Faced with preparing a huge Comma delimited data
> set from a very large database PHP simply died a death
>
> I wrote that bit in C.

Perl does that very well.

In alt.folklore.computers Peter Dean <p.dean@invalid.net> wrote:
> In alt.folklore.computers rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> It does work well. I was going to look into SpatiaLite but never got
>> around to it. Supposedly the syntax is similar to PostGIS, which would be
>> nice.
>
> It has a very kludgy syntax for the KNN operation. Last time I looked anyway.
> Postgis has the <> operator. I use that a lot.

typo

<->

On 2024-10-26, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Oct 2024, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> On 2024-10-25, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Irrelevant. The question was if the economy is zero sum or not. That is
>>> pure nonsense and a child can realize it when looking at the population
>>> increase from the time of jesus until now.
>>
>> I take it you're a climate change denier, then.
>
> Nope. I am climate rationalist. Are you a climate hysteric?

No, I merely accept climate change as a done deal. It's time
to drop the illusion that it can be rolled back, and start
finding ways to live with it.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | We'll go down in history as the
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | first society that wouldn't save
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | itself because it wasn't cost-
/ \ if you read it the right way. | effective. -- Kurt Vonnegut

On 2024-10-26, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> On 26/10/2024 05:38, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> On 2024-10-25, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 25 Oct 2024 17:32:03 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 2024-10-25, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Being forced to be an Ada programmer - it'd be like one of those
>>>>> legendary Greek tortures of hell ...
>>>>
>>>> Another one is being forced to maintain payroll programs forever.
>>>
>>> My personal hell is database programming. Gods know I've done enough of it
>>> but it always feels like shoveling shit against the tide.
>>
>> I'm proud to say that in 50 years of programming I've managed
>> to never go near a DBMS.
>
> It was people like you who ensured that in the end I did.

Great. There's plenty of work to go around, and each of us
can find our niche.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | We'll go down in history as the
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | first society that wouldn't save
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | itself because it wasn't cost-
/ \ if you read it the right way. | effective. -- Kurt Vonnegut

In alt.folklore.computers Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:
> On 2024-10-26, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> On 26/10/2024 02:58, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>> PHP is fair, but it's not really a good DB
>>>   editing lang.
>>
>> You can say that again. Faced with preparing a huge Comma delimited data
>> set from a very large database PHP simply died a death
>>
>> I wrote that bit in C.
>
> Perl does that very well.

If you have enough memory. I was using a Perl program to handle
1.3 MB data file. The program was running out of memory on 8 MB
machine. There was some supidity in the design: program was
written as a pipline of two processes, each keeping the whole
dataset in memory. But also Perl data structures were memory-hungry.
That motivated me to write my own implementation of hash table
(in C), which comfortably stored the data set in available memory.

Of course, frequently one can do processing just storing "current
line" and Perl allows to do this. But many examples keep all
data in memory and in my case this was necessery.

--
Waldek Hebisch

Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
> Then before I graduate, I'm hired fulltime into a small group in the
> Boeing CFO office to help with the consolidation of all dataprocessing
> into independent business unit. I though that Renton datacenter was
> possibly largest in the world, a couple hundred million in IBM 360
> stuff, 360/65s were arriving faster than they could be installed, boxes
> constantly being staged in the hallways around the machine room. Also a
> lot of politics betweeen Renton director and CFO who only had a 360/30
> up at Boeing field for payroll (although they enlarge the room to
> install a 360/67 for me to play with when I wasn't doing other stuff).

when I graduate, I join the science center (instead of staying with
Boeing CFO).

Later I transfer out to SJR, I get to wonder around silicon valley
datacenters, including disk bldgs 14 (engineering) and 15 (product test)
across the street. They were doing 7x24, prescheduled, stand-alone
testing and mention that they had recently tried MVS, but it had 15min
MTBF (in that environment). I offer to rewrite I/O supervisor so it is
bullet proof and never fails, so they can do any amount of on-demand,
concurrent testing, greatly improving productivity. Downside I had to
spend increasing amount of time playing disk engineer diagnosing
hardware development issues. Bldg15 gets early engineering systems for
disk I/O testing and got both 3033 and 4341. In jan1979 (well before
4341 customer ship), I get con'ed into doing benchmark on the 4341 for
national lab that was looking at getting 70 for a compute farm (sort of
the leading edge of the coming cluster supercomputing tsunami).

I also get con'ed into working with Jim Gray and Vera Watson on original
SQL/relational, System/R. Official next DBMS "EAGLE" was to be follow-on
to IMS ... and was able to do technology transfer to Endicott for SQL/DS
("under the radar" while the company was preoccupied with "EAGLE"). When
Jim leaves for Tandem, he tries to palm off a bunch of stuff including
supporting BofA which was in System/R joint study and getting 60 4341s,
sort of the leading edge of the coming distributed computing tsunami
(large corporations start ordering hundreds at a time for placing out in
departmental areas, inside IBM, conference were becoming in short supply
being converted to VM/4341 rooms). Note after "EAGLE" finally implodes,
there is a request for how fast could System/R be ported to
MVS. Eventually port is released as "DB2", originally for "decision
support" only.

Late 80s (decade after 4341 benchmark), got HA/6000 project, originally
for NYTimes to convert their newspaper system (ATEX) from DEC VAXcluster
to RS/6000. I rename it HA/CMP when I start doing technical/scientific
cluster scale-up with national labs and commercial cluster scale-up with
RDBMS vendors (Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and Ingres that have VAXCluser
support in same source base with UNIX; I do distributed lock manager
supporting VAXCluster semantics to ease the port). Early Jan1992, have
meeting with Oracle CEO and AWD/Hester tells Ellison that we would have
16-system clusters by mid92 and 128-system clusters by ye92. Then by end
of Jan1992 we get corporate kneecapping with cluster scale-up being
transferred for announce as IBM supercomputer (for technical/scientific
*ONLY*) and we are told we can't do anything with more than four
processors (we leave IBM shortly later).

trivia: email sent out possibly just hrs before the kneecapping,
referencing that IBM FSD had agreed to strategic HA/CMP cluster scale-up
(code name: MEDUSA) for gov. customers ...
alt.folklore.computers(/comp.arch) two decade old archived posting
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#3
with copy of the email
https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#email920129

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

On Sat, 26 Oct 2024, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2024-10-26, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 26 Oct 2024, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> On 2024-10-25, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Irrelevant. The question was if the economy is zero sum or not. That is
>>>> pure nonsense and a child can realize it when looking at the population
>>>> increase from the time of jesus until now.
>>>
>>> I take it you're a climate change denier, then.
>>
>> Nope. I am climate rationalist. Are you a climate hysteric?
>
> No, I merely accept climate change as a done deal. It's time
> to drop the illusion that it can be rolled back, and start
> finding ways to live with it.

It's mostly natural anyway, so that's the only option we have. Thanks to
science and technology, it will actually be a net benefit due to global
greening, increased harvests and reclaimed deserts. I'm very positive
about the future! =)

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
> According to Peter Flass <peter_flass@yahoo.com>:
>>> My first computer was a 12K (BCD charactersw) IBM 1401 running FORTRAN IV.
>>> Better compiler writers in those days...
>
> Luxury! Mine was a PDP-8 with 4K 12-bit words and low speed paper tape. It had
> a Fortran system but it wasn't worth the effort. We mostly used FOCAL, which
> was sort of a cut down Joss, and a homebrewed Trac interpreter.
>
>> OK, I surrender. Somewhere I have a book about the first FORTRAN compiler
>> for (I think) the 704. Those guys were geniuses.
>
> You're probably thinking of Abstracting Away the Machine, self-published
> by Mark Jones Lorenzo. It's pretty good.

Yes, thanks.

>
> Even by modern standards the original Fortran compiler generated very respectable
> code. If could do loop merging, turning two nested loops into one when the indexes
> were used in simple enough ways.
>

--
Pete

On Sat, 26 Oct 2024 18:01:02 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> There's plenty of work to go around, and each of us can find our
> niche.

My main clients are SMEs. I have to be the jack-of-all-trades for them.

HA/CMP (MEDUSA) (mainframe/6000 comparison) footnote:

1993 eight processor ES/9000-982 : 408MIPS, 51MIPS/processor
1993 RS6000/990 : 126MIPS; (HA/CMP clusters) 16-system: 2016MIPS,
128-system: 16,128MIPS

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

On 2024-10-26, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Oct 2024, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> On 2024-10-26, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, 26 Oct 2024, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 2024-10-25, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Irrelevant. The question was if the economy is zero sum or not. That is
>>>>> pure nonsense and a child can realize it when looking at the population
>>>>> increase from the time of jesus until now.
>>>>
>>>> I take it you're a climate change denier, then.
>>>
>>> Nope. I am climate rationalist. Are you a climate hysteric?
>>
>> No, I merely accept climate change as a done deal. It's time
>> to drop the illusion that it can be rolled back, and start
>> finding ways to live with it.
>
> It's mostly natural anyway, so that's the only option we have. Thanks to
> science and technology, it will actually be a net benefit due to global
> greening, increased harvests and reclaimed deserts. I'm very positive
> about the future! =)

I wish I could say I was. But IMHO any gains will be more than
consumed by our ever-increasing population. Yes, I'm a Malthusian.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | We'll go down in history as the
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | first society that wouldn't save
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | itself because it wasn't cost-
/ \ if you read it the right way. | effective. -- Kurt Vonnegut

On 26/10/2024 17:44, Lars Poulsen wrote:
> On 2024-10-26, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> On 26/10/2024 02:58, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>> PHP is fair, but it's not really a good DB
>>>   editing lang.
>>
>> You can say that again. Faced with preparing a huge Comma delimited data
>> set from a very large database PHP simply died a death
>>
>> I wrote that bit in C.
>
> Perl does that very well.

It may well. I have never written a line of it and would be happy to
have that written on my gravestone.

--
"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They
always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them"

Margaret Thatcher

On 26/10/2024 19:01, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2024-10-26, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 26 Oct 2024, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> On 2024-10-25, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Irrelevant. The question was if the economy is zero sum or not. That is
>>>> pure nonsense and a child can realize it when looking at the population
>>>> increase from the time of jesus until now.
>>>
>>> I take it you're a climate change denier, then.
>>
>> Nope. I am climate rationalist. Are you a climate hysteric?
>
> No, I merely accept climate change as a done deal. It's time
> to drop the illusion that it can be rolled back, and start
> finding ways to live with it.
>

Well we probably agree on that.

If you look at the CO2 figures from Mauna Loa and plot them against
renewable energy etc, you will see that renewable energy which has cost
trillions, has made no detectable difference.

The argument is shifting away from climate that we can't realistically
change, or even CO2 that we might or might not emit, to what
realistically we are going to use for energy when we have reduced the
fossil fuels in the ground from cheap and plentiful to rare and
expensive resources.

And the verdict is coming in. It wont be renewables, for sure.

--
"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They
always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them"

Margaret Thatcher

On 27/10/2024 02:06, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2024-10-26, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 26 Oct 2024, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> On 2024-10-26, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Sat, 26 Oct 2024, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 2024-10-25, D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Irrelevant. The question was if the economy is zero sum or not. That is
>>>>>> pure nonsense and a child can realize it when looking at the population
>>>>>> increase from the time of jesus until now.
>>>>>
>>>>> I take it you're a climate change denier, then.
>>>>
>>>> Nope. I am climate rationalist. Are you a climate hysteric?
>>>
>>> No, I merely accept climate change as a done deal. It's time
>>> to drop the illusion that it can be rolled back, and start
>>> finding ways to live with it.
>>
>> It's mostly natural anyway, so that's the only option we have. Thanks to
>> science and technology, it will actually be a net benefit due to global
>> greening, increased harvests and reclaimed deserts. I'm very positive
>> about the future! =)
>
> I wish I could say I was. But IMHO any gains will be more than
> consumed by our ever-increasing population. Yes, I'm a Malthusian.
>

Short of building huge towers of nuclear illuminated hyrdoponics we can
realistically increase the land area under agriculture.
And there are distinct signs that human nature is beginning to
subconsciously decrease human populatins.

--
"I am inclined to tell the truth and dislike people who lie consistently.
This makes me unfit for the company of people of a Left persuasion, and
all women"

On 26/10/2024 19:01, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2024-10-26, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> On 26/10/2024 05:38, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>
>>> On 2024-10-25, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Fri, 25 Oct 2024 17:32:03 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 2024-10-25, 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Being forced to be an Ada programmer - it'd be like one of those
>>>>>> legendary Greek tortures of hell ...
>>>>>
>>>>> Another one is being forced to maintain payroll programs forever.
>>>>
>>>> My personal hell is database programming. Gods know I've done enough of it
>>>> but it always feels like shoveling shit against the tide.
>>>
>>> I'm proud to say that in 50 years of programming I've managed
>>> to never go near a DBMS.
>>
>> It was people like you who ensured that in the end I did.
>
> Great. There's plenty of work to go around, and each of us
> can find our niche.
>
Absolutely. I am not interested in writing PERL or Python or Pascal.
It all smells of pee anyway.
I am however deeply interested in modelling things like manufacturing,
sub assemblies, parts, just in time supply , and product costings, all
integrated with online orders and sales, and financial reports.

SQL is pretty much as perfect tool for that. Or lets be clear - a
relational database is the perfect tool, and MySQL is only a
*moderately* shit way to access it.

I never bothered learning the more arcane side of SQL because if I ever
managed to get the query right, it was always so abysmally slow that it
was quicker to use a series of simple queries and join them together in
application code rather than SQL

--
"I am inclined to tell the truth and dislike people who lie consistently.
This makes me unfit for the company of people of a Left persuasion, and
all women"

On 26/10/2024 19:48, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> In alt.folklore.computers Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:
>> On 2024-10-26, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>> On 26/10/2024 02:58, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>>> PHP is fair, but it's not really a good DB
>>>>   editing lang.
>>>
>>> You can say that again. Faced with preparing a huge Comma delimited data
>>> set from a very large database PHP simply died a death
>>>
>>> I wrote that bit in C.
>>
>> Perl does that very well.
>
> If you have enough memory. I was using a Perl program to handle
> 1.3 MB data file. The program was running out of memory on 8 MB
> machine. There was some supidity in the design: program was
> written as a pipline of two processes, each keeping the whole
> dataset in memory. But also Perl data structures were memory-hungry.
> That motivated me to write my own implementation of hash table
> (in C), which comfortably stored the data set in available memory.
>
> Of course, frequently one can do processing just storing "current
> line" and Perl allows to do this. But many examples keep all
> data in memory and in my case this was necessery.
>
Yup.

I had the same issues when using PHP.

There exists in a non relational form a database of counties, postcodes
and addresses and which political entity is notionally in charge
(borough and country councils etc) that I needed to turn into a
relational database.

MySQL couldn't do it. Or at least a day later it hadn't.
Neither could PHP.

But I wrote a C program in a couple of hours that would do the job, and
do it in about an hour, so after three iterations to sort out the
unpleasantness of town names like 'John O' Groats' and a few other
issues, I had my database...

--
"I guess a rattlesnake ain't risponsible fer bein' a rattlesnake, but ah
puts mah heel on um jess the same if'n I catches him around mah chillun".

["Followup-To:" header set to alt.folklore.computers.]
On 2024-10-27, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 26/10/2024 19:48, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
>> In alt.folklore.computers Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com> wrote:
>>> On 2024-10-26, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>>> On 26/10/2024 02:58, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>>>> PHP is fair, but it's not really a good DB
>>>>>   editing lang.
>>>>
>>>> You can say that again. Faced with preparing a huge Comma delimited data
>>>> set from a very large database PHP simply died a death
>>>>
>>>> I wrote that bit in C.
>>>
>>> Perl does that very well.
>>
>> If you have enough memory. I was using a Perl program to handle
>> 1.3 MB data file. The program was running out of memory on 8 MB
>> machine. There was some supidity in the design: program was
>> written as a pipline of two processes, each keeping the whole
>> dataset in memory. But also Perl data structures were memory-hungry.
>> That motivated me to write my own implementation of hash table
>> (in C), which comfortably stored the data set in available memory.
>>
>> Of course, frequently one can do processing just storing "current
>> line" and Perl allows to do this. But many examples keep all
>> data in memory and in my case this was necessery.
>>
> Yup.
>
> I had the same issues when using PHP.
>
> There exists in a non relational form a database of counties, postcodes
> and addresses and which political entity is notionally in charge
> (borough and country councils etc) that I needed to turn into a
> relational database.
>
> MySQL couldn't do it. Or at least a day later it hadn't.
> Neither could PHP.
>
> But I wrote a C program in a couple of hours that would do the job, and
> do it in about an hour, so after three iterations to sort out the
> unpleasantness of town names like 'John O' Groats' and a few other
> issues, I had my database...
>
>
and Westward Ho! I hope!

On 2024-10-27, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> Short of building huge towers of nuclear illuminated hyrdoponics we can

Did you mean "can't"?

> realistically increase the land area under agriculture.

My back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that if we continue
to double our population every 40 years, there will be one person
for every square meter of (more-or-less) dry land - including
swamps, deserts, and mountain crags - in 600 years. That's
not much longer than it's been since Columbus did his thing.

> And there are distinct signs that human nature is beginning to
> subconsciously decrease human populatins.

Yes, and governments are alarmed at this, and are trying to find
ways to get population growth back up to where they want it.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | We'll go down in history as the
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | first society that wouldn't save
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | itself because it wasn't cost-
/ \ if you read it the right way. | effective. -- Kurt Vonnegut

According to Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid>:
>On 2024-10-27, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Short of building huge towers of nuclear illuminated hyrdoponics we can
>My back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that if we continue
>to double our population every 40 years, ...

You might want to get some numbers for your envelope more recent than the 1950s.

Here's a good place to start:

https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/900

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

On Sun, 27 Oct 2024 09:32:16 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 26/10/2024 17:44, Lars Poulsen wrote:
>> On 2024-10-26, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>> On 26/10/2024 02:58, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
>>>> PHP is fair, but it's not really a good DB
>>>>   editing lang.
>>>
>>> You can say that again. Faced with preparing a huge Comma delimited
>>> data set from a very large database PHP simply died a death
>>>
>>> I wrote that bit in C.
>>
>> Perl does that very well.
>
> It may well. I have never written a line of it and would be happy to
> have that written on my gravestone.

I used it about 25 years ago. One thing I appreciated was the layer of
abstraction between the code and the database.