Sorry, using an extreme case which involves something that no one would actually do in Perl anyway does not disprove the point that programmers should typically be more concerned about readability than speed when dealing with micro-optimizations like this one. Sure, you can find some case where a switch statement would make a difference, but it will be very rare. A reasonable approach to performance is to pick a good high-level architecture, write your program in a clear and readable way, profile it to find trouble spots, and fix them. Writing something that is hard to read from the beginning just because a confusing-looking switch statement ran a microsecond faster than the clearer one is not a good programming practice in any language.

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