I come to harken unto the abounding programming knowledge of the monks! Recently, while having a chat with a programmer friend, the subject of perl came up (imagine!) and he said that, while he liked coding in Perl, he found C to be more useful because it was faster. He attributed this speed to C being a compiled language (I THINK is what he said, not sure though as I have eaten since then); my question is, is C really superior to Perl in speed, or is my friend just a dirty stinking rotten liar? Also, how does Perl compare with the likes of C, C++, Java, COBOL, Pascal, basic, and whatever other languages are out there? I'm sure this question has been raised a bazillion times (so sorry if this seems a tedious node, but I posess an inquisitive mind so I'd like to know!), and if this was not the proper forum for this discussion, sorry again.
Thanks monks!