Hi LanX,

The inner for loops are each executed 3,789,182 times.

And yes, I originally had $s =~ /$re/ instead of $s =~ $re — it made no appreciable difference.

Update: Deparsing suggests that Perl adds the slashes anyway:

16:57 >perl -we "my $q = qr/^(\d+)$/; 123 =~ $q; print qq[$1\n];"
123

16:57 >perl -MO=Deparse -we "my $q = qr/^(\d+)$/; 123 =~ $q; print qq[
+$1\n];"
BEGIN { $^W = 1; }
my $q = qr/^(\d+)$/;
123 =~ /$q/;
print "$1\n";
-e syntax OK

16:57 >
[download]

Cheers,