Writing efficent code is important. But it's far more important to write code efficently. Which is a more important optimization problem:

  1. Write a program to do such-and-such. You have a month, after which we will time everybody's program, and the fastest program wins.
  2. Write a program to do such-and-such. The first person to finish a program that can do it wins.

Perl isn't a good language for writing fast code in. It is a good language for writing code in fast. That isn't to say you ignore computer-time-efficency issues... but you worry about the ones that cause 10% slowdown, and not 0.001% slowdown. If you need more speed, then you start worrying about the readability-vs-execution-speed tradeoffs, or rewrite the bits that need more speed in C.

Of course, nothing in this node is to be taken too literally. I'm exagerating for effect. But think long and hard about it.

In reply to Re^2: Using aliases in for loops or not? by theorbtwo
in thread Using aliases in for loops or not? by jkva

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