The point of the exercise is not to access lexical variables. They are used only so something happens in case that code will otherwise be optimised away (I don't know the internals well enough to be sure). I should have been clearer about this in my original post.

In reply to Re^5: "exists $hash{key}" is slower than "$hash{key}" by swl
in thread "exists $hash{key}" is slower than "$hash{key}" by swl

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