The point that several people have already made is that speed is not the sole reason for choosing a language. If that were true everybody would be coding in assembler.

If writing out those integers needs to be done faster than perl can do it, then you obviously use a language faster than perl.

If it doesn't - I'll pick perl out of the above three languages since I only have to write and maintain 6 lines of code. Compared to C's 15 and Java's 19.

Most of the time programmer efficiency, robustness, maintainability, portability, etc. are far more important than raw speed when it comes to language choice. Especially since many programs have their speed bound by external factors (disk, network, database, etc.) rather than by CPU.

Speed in meaningless tasks like the above is not an issue for most people, most of the time.

In reply to Re^2: Teach him a lesson with facts by adrianh
in thread Teach him a lesson with facts by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.