I am beginning to learn some Perl, and I decided to do a little performance comparison between Java and Perl. I took an example from Sam's Teach Yourself (Listing 3.3) which is the classic 'print the primes' program, and I modified it to display the execution time. Then I made a few more changes so it would run as a Java program. To my surprise, Java was MUCH faster than Perl. In Java, to print out the first 100 prime numbers took only milliseconds, but the same program in Perl took 10 seconds. HUGE difference! I thought that Perl would be much faster, but I guess I was wrong. Can anyone provide some feedback on this? Here is the code for Perl: 
    $maxprimes=100;  
    $value=1;  
    $count=0;  
    $start=time();  
    print "Printing the first $maxprimes numbers that are prime... \n"
+;  
    while ($count < $maxprimes)   
    {  
       $value++;  
       $composite=0;#false  
       OUTER:   
          for ($i=2; $i < $value; $i++)   
          {  
             INNER:  
                for ($j=$i; $j<$value; $j++)   
                {  
                   if (($j*$i) == $value)   
                   {  
                      $composite=1;#true  
                      last OUTER;  
                   }  
                }  
          }  
          if (! $composite)   
          {  
             $count++;  
             print "$value is prime\n";  
          }  
    }  
    $time = (time() - $start);  
    print "Took $time seconds.";

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And here is the listing for Java:

    public class Listing3_3  
    {  
        public static void main(String[] args)  
        {  
            int $maxprimes=100;  
            int $value=1;  
            int $count=0;  
              
            long $start = System.currentTimeMillis();  
            System.out.println("Printing the first " + $maxprimes + " 
+numbers that are prime... \n");  
            while ($count < $maxprimes)   
            {  
               $value++;  
               int $composite=0;//false  
               OUTER:   
                  for (int $i=2; $i < $value; $i++)   
                  {  
                     INNER:  
                        for (int $j=$i; $j<$value; $j++)   
                        {  
                           if (($j*$i) == $value)   
                           {  
                              $composite=1;//true  
                              break OUTER;  
                           }  
                        }  
                  }  
                  if ($composite == 1)   
                  {  
                     $count++;  
                     System.out.println($value + " is prime\n");  
                  }  
            }  
            long $time = (System.currentTimeMillis() - $start) / 1000;
+  
            System.out.println("Took " + $time + " seconds");  
        }  
    }

[download]

In reply to performance of perl vs java by Anonymous Monk

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