Newbie question: files..

[Tim Peters]

[Sonny Parlin]
> ...
> Please keep in mind that I'm pretty ignorant to how Perl (or python
> for that matter) is implemented under the hood.

[Hrvoje Niksic]
> You probably don't want to know about Perl.  :-)

Indeed, it is a marvel to me that they manage to keep Perl running at all!
No wink implied -- the Perl source is frightening.

> Python, on the other hand, is very clean and very slow.

It isn't slower than Perl in my experience (the contrary) -- but then I use
Perl for the little bit of serious text-crunching and regexp-slinging that
comes up in my work.  Perl put extraordinary effort into implementing those
efficiently; outside of them, I find that Python is typically faster.
Disclaimer:  I haven't used Perl for anything *but* text-crunching and
regexp-slinging for several years, and it could be they've sped it "in
general" since then.  To judge from its current source code, though, it
would have to have been sped supernaturally to overcome the maze of internal
special cases.

try-timing-a-program-with-bigints<wink>-ly y'rs  - tim