I did write the code for all three languages and I did run them. I didn't post the code because 1) the poster was correct about the timing and 2) as others in the thread pointed out, it is a very contrived and useless test case for language comparison. Why does the Java and C code run faster? Loop optimization. The java compiler and c compiler I used optimized the loop away so the execution time is O(1). Perl did not optimize the loop away. Could it have? I'm not sure if there are any command line switches to do this type of optimization. Should that be the basis to throw away the whole language? No. Pure execution speed should be just one of your criteria and a very low one at that (otherwise we'd all be programming in machine language).

-derby

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