> If I am really interested in the theoretical performance of a language, I'd use microbenchmarks for standard library functions. How much time does it take to

> If I am really interested in the theoretical performance of a language, I'd use microbenchmarks for standard library functions. How much time does it take to sort an array? Reverse a list? Split a string? Etc. The standard library may not be implemented in the language you're evaluating. Especially for scripting languages, and things like regular expressions and bignums.