Originally Posted by
MK27
My point is that the main meal is in the last step, and without a much more detailed understanding of how the interpreter works, I think you are throwing darts blindfolded to conjecture about what the relationship of the first two steps to the last one is. Pretty clearly, the goal would be to minimize them, and also pretty clearly, the execution time is mostly in the library objects that the interpreter links to -- which is the C library.
However, no one (including me) is claiming this is always the case, or that perl could do it faster, etc.
God no. I have read a lot of the "Dragon Book", I'm not talking totally off the top of my head. Altho I did not get much beyond parsing, which is mostly string interpretation. IMO this is kind of a red herring anyway: what constitutes string interpretation? AFAICT it would be synonymous with parsing a data stream, which can cover a pretty range of activity.
*eg, 3D rendering with dynamic textures, which is pretty specific and does not mean "all 3D rendering"