So, have we by now established that a one-liner which does absolutely nothing in the loop, as I suggested, does not run in a time comparable to the one that uses the no-op inline function, but runs considerably faster?   That my hypothesis that this does not actually have to with the inline implementation but is endemic to the Perl interpreter version itself, has therefore now been tested and has been proven false?   I wasn’t clear if this idea had been tried – or simply ignored – and what the outcome turned out to be, if it was tried.