Re: Speed comparison of PHP vs. PERL (not conclusive)

In article <20020531213619.27198.qmail@pb1.pair.com>, rubein@earthlink.net (Daniel Grace) wrote: > Comments? I was expecting the numbers to be very similiar -- rather shocked > that the PERL ended up being about 2.5x as fast as PHP was. As Rasmus says, one of the things Perl was designed for was speed. The Perl designers really take speed seriously for things like this, because Perl tends to be used for things like looping over a few million lines of text. I resisted Perl for a long time because of its somewhat odd syntax, but the first time I programmed in it seriously, the main thing that wasted my time was that I didn't believe my program was working; I was re-writing a log analysis program; the previous version, in a different language (which did other things very well but wasn't designed for looping at all) took about 6 hours to complete an analysis. It was getting to where I could foresee that the daily log analysis was going to take longer than a day! I couldn't get the Perl program to do anything. It seemed to work on the short test data, but on the full file I'd type the command and it would just drop right back to the command line. Of course the program was working fine--Perl was doing its work almost instantaneously. Each language has its advantages; I tend to use PHP for web pages, but there are times I'd like to easily switch back and forth between PHP and Perl on the same page. Perl makes great filters. Jerry -- http://www.hoboes.com/jerry/ "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you've depleted the lake."--It Isn't Murder If They're Yankees (http://www.hoboes.com/jerry/Murder/)