Indeed! This doesn't just apply to copy and paste either, as I often find things that can be done better or simply coded more clearly when I pull out some little program I wrote 6 months ago. I take the fact that I'm using it a second time as a sign that a little more investment of effort could well pay off in the future. Recently I have found myself replacing silly little loops with map or grep (as appropriate) and finding the clarity of the code improves significantly.

On your specific example, you could go a step farther and eliminate the multiple sprintf calls. On my box (Win95, ActiveState 628) this appears to be 20% faster than the array improvement alone:

sub zeit_mit_Albannach {
  # new function calling sprintf only once
  my @zeit = localtime;
  my $wtag = ("So","Mo","Di","Mi","Do","Fr","Sa")[$zeit[6]];
  sprintf("$wtag %02d.%02d.%4d - %02d:%02d", 
          $zeit[3], $zeit[4]+1, $zeit[5] + 1900, $zeit[2], $zeit[1]);
}
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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser