Been busy myself... with Roger as well. He wants to try XB so I'm playing teacher.

The big advantage in speed with XBasic is that it compiles directly to machine code to be run directly by the CPU.

Both Perl and TB are run-time interpreted.

Even though you may compile the program to an .EXE, it only compiles to an intermediate "byte-code". When you execute the program, the run time interpreter has to interpret the byte code on the fly and translate it to machine code for the CPU. It takes time for it to do so, thus runs slower.

There are some advantages to this, but the real downside is speed, or lack thereof.

Using a sleep command may mean the program is not using any CPU, but it's also not doing anything at all. So it's not a good test of CPU hogging. Although, it's odd that TB would still use CPU cycles during such a pause. It shouldn't. Probably poorly implemented.

Brian