Off the top of my head I seem to recall that the slice operation is quicker than using a loop as most of the work is being done in C rather transitioning between C and perl as with a loop. However, you would probably need to be setting a few hundred elements of the array at a time, and/or doing this very often before you would notice the difference in runtime of your script.

That said, the slice method is very clean syntactically, so there is no reason not to use it, and any performance benefit never hurts, and is a nice bonus.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w -- 
use strict;
use Benchmark 'cmpthese';
cmpthese(-3,{
   'perloop' => sub {
        my @array;
        for(0..49) {
            $array[$_]=50;
        }
        return();
   },
   'c-loop' => sub {
        my @array;
        for(my $i=0; $i<50; $i++) {
            $array[$i]=50;
        }
        return();
   },
   'rangeslice' => sub {
        my @array;
        @array[0..49] = (50) x 50;
        return();
   },
   'literalslice' => sub {
        my @array;
        @array[
0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,
21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,
38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49
        ] = (
50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,
50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,
50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,
50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,
50,50,50,50,50,50
        );
        return();
   },
   'literalassign' => sub {
        my @array = (
50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,
50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,
50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,
50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,50,
50,50,50,50,50,50
        );
        return();
   },

   'repeatassign' => sub {
        my @array = (50) x 50;
        return();
   },

});
__END__
Benchmark: running c-loop, literalassign, literalslice, perloop, range
+slice, repeatassign, each for at least 3 CPU seconds...
       c-loop:  3 wallclock secs ( 3.39 usr +  0.00 sys =  3.39 CPU) @
+ 31973.75/s (n=108391)
literalassign:  4 wallclock secs ( 3.09 usr +  0.00 sys =  3.09 CPU) @
+ 122232.14/s (n=378064)
 literalslice:  4 wallclock secs ( 3.00 usr +  0.00 sys =  3.00 CPU) @
+ 92383.00/s (n=277149)
      perloop:  4 wallclock secs ( 3.00 usr +  0.00 sys =  3.00 CPU) @
+ 40371.54/s (n=121155)
   rangeslice:  3 wallclock secs ( 3.02 usr +  0.00 sys =  3.02 CPU) @
+ 65742.71/s (n=198280)
 repeatassign:  4 wallclock secs ( 3.19 usr +  0.00 sys =  3.19 CPU) @
+ 129130.18/s (n=411667)
                  Rate c-loop perloop rangeslice literalslice literala
+ssign repeatassign
c-loop         31974/s     --    -21%       -51%         -65%         
+ -74%         -75%
perloop        40372/s    26%      --       -39%         -56%         
+ -67%         -69%
rangeslice     65743/s   106%     63%         --         -29%         
+ -46%         -49%
literalslice   92383/s   189%    129%        41%           --         
+ -24%         -28%
literalassign 122232/s   282%    203%        86%          32%         
+   --          -5%
repeatassign  129130/s   304%    220%        96%          40%         
+   6%           --
[download]

Oh I see.

I guess I'll do a test and see how big the difference would be.

Thank you again.