Possibly. But please remember when Perl is used in a mod_perl environment with a prefork MPM, you want to keep as much memory shared between children. This behaviour of Perl is very counter-productive in that environment: I'd rather take a little CPU hit for the overhead of creating the lexical again, and not unsharing any further memory, than have the current situation.

More generally, I think the current behaviour of Perl to use more memory rather than more CPU, becomes more and more counter-productive as the speed of accessing memory is growing slower than the speed of the CPU with each new generation of systems.

Liz