Well ... the speed ... it's both right and wrong. If you translate some code statement-for-statement from C to Perl, then Perl will lose hands down. For a large group of tasks a well written Perl script will beat anything you could write in C in reasonable time to pulp. The built-ins of Perl had been hand-optimized for years so if you can implement the task by a few calls to those built-ins, your program will finish sooner than if you attempt to reimplement them in your own code. In most cases it simply doesn't matter though.