On: Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

[cutler]

With pre-compiled regex the Python version comes down to 1.483s on my machine which is still considerably slower than Perl. I wrote versions of these using substring `index` instead of a regex and Perl was still the clear winner:

    time ./index.pl  0.258s
    time ./index.py  0.609s

If you factor-in that Python startup time is 0.279s slower than Perl the processing differential comes down to 0.072s.

[dgfitz → cutler]

I'd be curious on your take of my code below, I have python and perl as dead even if you don't print and ignore pythons startup time.

[cutler → dgfitz]

Well, the two ifs you hedge to qualify Python's parity are pretty damning in themselves, no? Let's stop beating about the bush - if you want to perform a common text-processing job like parsing a log file Perl is hands down faster than Python.