> The point is that I want to develop a coding style which tries hard to > do early premature optimizations.
We've talked about this kind of thing before. My opinion is still the same as it was: low-level speed optimization before you have a working system is a waste of your time. It's much better to build your system, profile it, and fix the bottlenecks. The most effective changes are almost never simple coding changes like the one you showed, but rather large things like using qmail-inject instead of SMTP, caching a slow database query or method call, or changing your architecture to reduce the number of network accesses or inter-process communications. The exception to this rule is that I do advocate thinking about memory usage from the beginning. There are no good tools for profiling memory used by Perl, so you can't easily find the offenders later on. Being careful about passing references, slurping files, etc. pays off in better scalability later. - Perrin
