in reply to performance of perl vs java

Perl is more convenient to program in, but not necessarily faster (well, programming time is usually faster, runtime may be slower). Although I did get the perl version runtime down from about 10 seconds to a couple of seconds by just making the program a bit more perlish:
use strict; use warnings; my $maxprimes=100; my $value=1; my $count=0; my $start=time(); print "Printing the first $maxprimes numbers that are prime... \n"; while ($count < $maxprimes) { my $v = $value++; my $composite; OUTER: for my $i (2..$v) { INNER: for my $j ($i..$v) { if (($j*$i) == $value) { $composite=1;#true last OUTER; } } } if (! $composite) { $count++; print "$value is prime\n"; } } my $time = (time() - $start); print "Took $time seconds.\n";