That is what I understood, so I guess I was the one who wasn't clear. I'm saying he *is* timing the same thing: The time it takes to run the program. Using javac is not part of running a Java program whereas parsing the Perl sources is part of running a Perl program. Perl and Java do things differently, but that doesn't mean he's not timing the same thing. (If they did things the same way, what would be the point of timing them?)