Why go through the process of having to convert text to a hash at runtime, everytime; and load all languages for every run.

Putting each language in its own file would certainly be an improvement - I grant you that.

However, converting text to the hash at run time is actually *faster* than hardcoding the hash, at least for simple data.

Yes, that's right. This:

my %hash;
while (<DATA>)
{
        my ($k, $v) = split /\t/o;
        $hash{$k} = $v;
}
__DATA__
440035528809    6946395707444   
332679554392    162874763688655 
913537320343    56726180700920
[download]

is faster than this:

my %hash = (
440035528809=>'6946395707444',
332679554392=>'162874763688655',
913537320343=>'56726180700920',
);
[download]

Or at least it is once you've got more than a few hundred entries in the hash.

It seems counter-intuitive, but it makes sense when you think about it. In the first example we're parsing a very simple text format using Perl (and Perl is very fast at text handling!); in the second we're parsing a programming language using C.

use 5.010;
open my $perl, '>', 'perl.pl';
open my $data, '>', 'data.pl';

print $perl <<'CODE';
use strict;
my %hash = (
CODE

print $data <<'CODE';
use strict;
my %hash;
while (<DATA>)
{
    my ($k, $v) = split /\t/o;
    $hash{$k} = $v;
}
__DATA__
CODE

for (0 .. 100_000)
{
    my $k = int rand 1_000_000_000_000;
    my $v = int rand 1_000_000_000_000_000;
    print $perl "$k=>'$v',\n";
    print $data "$k\t$v\t\n";
}

print $perl <<'CODE';
);
CODE
[download]

I did quite a bit of benchmarking on this sort of thing for Crypt::XkcdPassword.