tye,
Calculating the ordinal value of $str_a only once was an obvious optimization. I was hurrying to get out of the office - that will teach me.

But I still consider such nano-optimization games to be more a waste than of value.

I completely disagree with you. You don't seem to condemn golfing, which I feel is more of a waste (probably because I am no good at it). It is not like I was complaining that my solution wasn't fast enough. I feel that such games are of value for a few of reasons: Now I am not saying one should sacrifice readability in order to save a few cycles or that a person should spend more programmer time than they will save in run time. As a periodic academic excersise, I see it has a lot of value. Of course, YMMV since you know a lot more than I do.

Cheers - L~R

In reply to Re: Re^2: Matching First Character of Strings Efficiently (benchmarking) by Limbic~Region
in thread Matching First Character of Strings Efficiently by Limbic~Region

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.