[fpc-pascal] fast text processing

[Bee]

Hi all,

I had never used Perl before. Until someone showed me Perl is very fast 
for text processing (using its powerful regex), despite it's an 
interpreted language. It even beat Delphi and FPC though both are 
compiled language. A few lines Perl program almost two times faster than 
a few pages pascal program.

How can an interpreted language is faster than a compiled language (I 
assume both has been optimized well and using the best algorithm)? Can 
FPC improve its text processing related classes/units, so they can be 
faster than Perl (as it should be, logically)? Especially the TStrings 
class.

TIA.

-Bee-

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