FYI, the Perl equivalent is probably "$i" (which in my benchmarks results in ~41% of the runtime. It doesn't appear to be optimized away either, as an empty lo

FYI, the Perl equivalent is probably "$i" (which in my benchmarks results in ~41% of the runtime. It doesn't appear to be optimized away either, as an empty loop and one with a simple incrementing variable that's printed at the end result in 19% of the running time. In Perl the appropriate way to convert a number to a string is to interpolate it or use a string based operator ("." for concatenation, etc) on it and let it convert the type itself. sprintf is very heavy and does quite a bit more than simply convert a number to a string.