I am going through this same issue now, except that I do have to have a reading prescription. I've had progressive lenses for about 2 years, this whole time having to have odd setups involving monitors that sit much lower than I prefer just to deal with the fact that I can't see the text on them clearly. I finally got sick of it, so my solution is, after getting an updated prescription a month ago, that I have an appointment tomorrow for a second set of glasses specifically for using with the computer. :|

I copied and pasted your exact code and compiled them with the Visual Studio 2008 (v9.0) compilers (cl for C++, csc for C#) and got wildly different results--C++ reported a time of 2.868 seconds, versus 4 for C#. My exact command lines were: For C++:

cl /EHcs cpptest.cpp

cpptest.exe > cppoutput.txt

For C#:

csc cstest.cs

cstest.exe > csoutput.txt

As far as why people say C++ is faster than C#--there are a great many factors, including how the code was written, what the code is doing, how it was compiled, the system (hardware and OS) it's run on, compilers, etc. that can make a difference, and no doubt there may be examples of C# performing some things faster in some instances. In general, I think it has more to do with the overhead inherent in C#, but that's just me speculating. Maybe we can get a real answer from someone knows more than I do about the internals of the languages (and whether managed C++/CLI would have had results similar to the C# code above).

According to the all-knowing Wikipedia it's 21 October 1805--however, my birthday is 30 October, so your comment piqued my interest in this thread.