I think you're arguing against a point I didn't make. (Though, in fairness, I might have been arguing against a point you didn't make.) I didn't suggest that optimization was unimportant or even undesirable; rather, that given a program almost entirely written in Perl, there's usually no point in speeding up the C bits. The key word is "usually", BTW; my main point is that optimization should only be attempted when profiling shows that the effort will be rewarded.

UPDATE: The following complaints are wrong; please ignore them. I've left them here for hysterical raisins, and so replies don't seem confusing.

BTW, you don't help your case when you use punctuation marks that are neither ASCII nor Latin-1; it makes your comments hard to read. Let me guess: You're using Windows, right? You ought to look at your comment from a Unix system; it has lots of question marks where they don't belong.

    -- Chip Salzenberg, Free-Floating Agent of Chaos