Oh, boy, favorite topic time.

I'll first make some enemies and some friends here. Perl is written in C, so when the parser has figured out what you want to do, you're executing compiled code as fast as any C program.

Most of the time, a C program is examining some kind of input syntax and deciding what to do. The only degree of difference is in how complex an input language you allow yourself to parse. Either your input language is complex, or you have to parse several times with different syntax subsets to make decisions: your choice.

Many people have attacked this problem, including Larry Wall. His answer is Perl, and, since he is/was a rocket scientist, I tend to think he has a few jets firing in the same direction, generally upward. Other people have gurgitated such things in C/C++ as Lua and Java and VisualBASIC.

Again, your choice. There's always a tradeoff between pure gnat's-burning-@ss speed and ease of development and maintenance. Most of the time it doesn't matter, because a second P-III and a few megs of RAM are blessedly cheap. Perl wins this one in many business equations.