You see? it's converted to for (;;) because it's more effecient. We can't benchmark the difference because of this optimization...

Hmm, im sorry but this is inconclusive to me. The output of B::Deparse is not necessarily exactly what is happening under the hood (as I said to kanji above). Now you may be correct that perl optimizes for(;;) and while(1) into the same construct, but nothing ive seen posted here shows what that construct is.

BTW a benchmark of while(1) versus for(;;) is as follows:

Benchmark: timing 1000000 iterations of for(;;), while(1)...
   for(;;): 71 wallclock secs (71.66 usr +  0.00 sys = 71.66 CPU) @ 13
+955.57/s (n=1000000)
  while(1): 71 wallclock secs (71.67 usr +  0.00 sys = 71.67 CPU) @ 13
+952.45/s (n=1000000)
            Rate while(1)  for(;;)
while(1) 13952/s       --      -0%
for(;;)  13956/s       0%       --
[download]

I agree this suggests they optimize down to the same thing..

:-)

Yves / DeMerphq
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Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.