Ouch. Perl has to compete against Common Lisp for a number crunching exercise? That's going to make it
. Plus the test seems way under specified. They don't mention how many iterations to run the algorithm. They don't mention if compile times are included ('cause you could certainly create a common lisp macro to do all the work at compile time). Oh, and you can pretty much guarentee that C will win the grand prize. Or am I misreading it? Are there three grand prizes? Overall the contest seems like quite a mess.