While general "computational" tasks are bound to be slower in Perl, it holds its own in text processing. I've had better performance from Perl than awk, grep, a

While general "computational" tasks are bound to be slower in Perl, it holds its own in text processing. I've had better performance from Perl than awk, grep, and even sed in some of my own tests (not to mention that the programs are orders of magnitude easier to write). It even seems from those benchmarks you posted Perl did quite well in the reverse complement and regex DNA tests, as I would have expected.