It shows that the simple sort is much faster than the Schwartzian sort, perhaps because of all the overheads the Schwartzian sort has.

Well, it shows that's the case with very little (and very simple) data. Instead of using little strings of a single character repeated up to ten times, try it with, say, 4k chunks of random character data. (I.e. use somthing like this to generate your @array:

foreach (0..1000) {
    my $string;
    $string .= ('a'..'z','A'..'Z')[rand 52] for 1 .. 4096;
    push @array, $string;
}
[download]

Benchmark: timing 1000 iterations of Schwartzian, Simple...
Schwartzian: 67 wallclock secs (66.85 usr +  0.04 sys = 66.89 CPU) @ 1
+4.95/s (n=
1000)
    Simple: 534 wallclock secs (533.43 usr +  0.06 sys = 533.49 CPU) @
+  1.87/s (
n=1000)
              Rate      Simple Schwartzian
Simple      1.87/s          --        -87%
Schwartzian 14.9/s        698%          --
[download]

It also shows that both lc and uc are O(N). Try the whole exercise again but sort by length and you'll probably find that there is no point to an ST at all. (Perl's length() is O(1).)

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";