Speed Comparison Perl Python & C

[Bart Nessux]

Just fooling around this weekend. Wrote and timed programs in C, Perl and
Python. Each Program counts to 1,000,000 and prints each number to the
console as it counts. I was a bit surprised. I'm not an expert C or Perl
programming expery, I'm most familiar with Python, but can use the others
as well.

Here are my results:

C = 23 seconds
Python = 26.5 seconds
Perl = 34.5 seconds

Here are the programs:

-------------------------
#The C version:
-------------------------

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
int x = 0;
while (x < 1000000) {
   printf("%d \n", x++);
   }
}

-------------------------
#The Python version:
-------------------------

#!/usr/bin/python

x = 0
while x < 1000000:
   x = x + 1
   print x

-------------------------
#The Perl version:
-------------------------

#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw

use strict;

my $x = 0;
while($x < 1000000) {
   print $x++, "\n";
   }

What do you guys think of this? I don't know enough about Perl & C, and
perhaps Python, to know if this was indeed a fair test. I thought C would
do this much faster than it did. Any ideas?