Not really actually. Perl is much more advanced and a much more complete language in terms of what you can do with it. As for speed, perl is again faster then PHP.

Where PHP shines is the fact that Apache can easily embed a PHP processor inside of itself. This means that the PHP processor is always loaded and always in memory, and running a php script is very quick. When you do the same thing with perl (via mod_perl or SpeedyCGI) the results are just as impressive.

The downside of course is that mod_perl is not as for ISP's to use as PHP (mainly because perl is so flexible that there are more ways to hurt yourself then with PHP).

Cheers,

Alex
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