Marcia - 12:52 am on Apr 15, 2001 (gmt 0)

peiliu, when you say "maintaining the program" are you talking about maintaining updates to the results of the program, like in updating a database?

Or are you referring to updating and modifying the program itself? To modify, or maintain, an actual program, you would need the actual source code, an editor capable of working with the source code, and either a language specific compiler or the ability to interpret the program, depending on which program it is.

Perl is an interpreted language, C++ is a compiled language - the above refers to these, for example. To maintain a database program created by an application program written in one of those languages, you just need to update the database itself.

That is the difference,so the procedure depends on what you are actually trying to do.

Hope this helps,
Marcia