Well, I recall reading something about Plucene, the Perl port of Lucene, being very difficult to get performant. After optimization it was uniformly slow because of many method calls. This wasn't really a problem in Java but was a problem in Perl.

(this is what I recall, a quick Google session didn't find me the mail or post I remember reading about this. Plucene developers would obviously know the real story here.)

But it is interesting what we do with this issue. Named parameters is a very common idiom. It is a very good idiom, in that it leads to maintainable code.

So, what can we do to make it perform better? Some special optimization of this case in the perl implementation? Some new syntax to support this idiom? Could it be related to the new named arguments being proposed for perl 5.12?

/J