Re: CGI vs ASP

[titivillus]

You can write CGI in any (for varying values of 'any') language. But with Activestate Perl, you can write your ASP in Perl, if you wish. I find that most Perl people are Unix people and Free/Open Source Software people. This is a good and wonderful thing, but it means dealing with anything Microsoft is bad. There are worse things than Microsoft -- I'd work with VB anytime before I touch Tcl again -- so I'll put aside those feelings and get directly to a practical place. Which is, ASP follows a PHP-like stance of putting the code within markup (lead the way, actually, but you get my point), while CGI puts the markup within code. So, if we were to build a 10x10 multiplication table, it'd be something like this in CGI/Perl:

print qq(<table>) ;
for my $a ( 1 .. 10 ) {
  print qq(<table><tr>) ;
  for my $b ( 1 .. 10 ) {
    my $c = $a * $b ;
    print qq(<td> $c </td>) ;
    }
  print qq(</tr>) ;
  }
print qq(</table>) ;

While something about the same in ASP would look more like this, although it's more PHP-ish and pseudocode:

<table>
<? for my $a ( 1 .. 10 ) { ?>
  <tr>
  <? for my $b ( 1 .. 10 ) { ?>
    <td><? ($a * $b) ?></td>
    <? } ?>
  </tr>
  <? } ?>
</table>

You can do interesting things in the Visual-Basic-like Microsoft languages. I have. Writing them isn't nearly as pleasurable as writing them in Perl, which is why I'm not a VB-monk, assuming any such thing exists. But if you want the code-within-markup experience, and you have a Unix/Linux server around, PHP would good (and cheaper than MS licenses) solution. And there might be Perl things that do it, too, but I don't know of anything.