As I told lhoward, the result will be highly dependent upon many things. What OS you are on, what compiler you used, whether you compiled with Perl's I/O or your native one, so on and so forth. (ObRandomNote: Ilya used to moan about the fact that Perl was "pessimized" for I/O on Linux. OTOH Perl is still faster at virtually everything else...)

I don't doubt for a second that he did that benchmark and got those numbers. I also don't doubt for a second that you did your benchmark and got your numbers as well. The lesson is that this kind of optimization can only be evaluated if you test against your actual target environment.

But the advantages in maintainability simply cannot be disputed. In addition to the bugs I already pointed out, what happens if someone changes $/ and tries to figure out why nothing happened?