I wanted to include in my Perl seminar updated timings of the comparative C/C++/Java/Awk/Perl found in The Practice Of Programming but I am a bit perplexed with the results and am unsure about what to do.

The fact is that to process the 4.2M of this Bible the C program takes for about 7.5 seconds, whereas the Perl code takes just 4.9 seconds. This has its explanation, and those implementations were not competing for speed in the book, but it would take longer to justify than it's worth.

The intention of that slide was to illustrate somehow that all the power Perl offers to the programmer is much cheaper than one would expect, for perl is very fast indeed. It is a simple statement to get the big picture, no more ambitious than that. I wanted to use those programs because they are public, taken from a well-known book, written by outstanding authors. But presenting a table with those timings would be actually confusing, and I wouldn't transmit the central idea in the end. Hmmmm.....