Python versus Perl

[Terry Reedy]

"Roy Smith" <roy at panix.com> wrote in message 
news:roy-A55323.15113410092005 at reader1.panix.com...
> Dieter Vanderelst <dieter.vanderelst at ugent.be> wrote:
>> 1 - How does the speed of execution of Perl compares to that of Python?

> To a first-order approximation, Perl and Python run at the same speed.

'Speed of execution' is a feature of an inplementation, not of languages 
themselves.  Different implementations of Python (for instance, CPython 
versus CPython+Psyco) can vary in speed by more than a factor of 10 for 
particular blocks of Python code.

(Yes, I know you are comparing the stock standard implementations, but my 
point still stands.)

> They are both interpreted languages.

To be useful, every language has to be interpreted sometime by something. 
In the narrow technical sense that I presume you mean, 'interpretation' 
versus 'compilation' is again an implementation feature, not a language 
feature.  As far as I know, neither Perl nor Python has an implementation 
that directly interprets in the way that Basic or tokenized Basic once was.

I am being picky because various people have claimed that Python suffers in 
popularity because it is known as an 'interpreted language'.  So maybe 
advocates should be more careful than we have been to not reinforce the 
misunderstanding.

Terry J. Reedy