My guess was that the original poster was trying to ask if it's faster to print within a subroutine or to return a value and then print it. My benchmark says that it's considerably faster to go ahead and print something right away, than to return it and print it. I suppose that's because calling the subroutine in void context allows some work to be optimized away. Of course, we're still comparing two things that are extremely fast, likely faster than almost anything else in a slow program, so it's unlikely that "optimizing" in this way would ever gain anything noticeable in a real-world situation. 

bannor:~/work/perl/monks$ cat 962552.pl
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Modern::Perl;
use Benchmark qw(:all);

cmpthese( 10_000_000, {
        'return it' => \&returnit,
        'print it'  => \&printit,
});

# printing to STDERR so I can redirect to /dev/null
# and still see the benchmark results

sub returnit {
    print STDERR _returnit();
}

sub _returnit {
    'foo';
}

sub printit {
    _printit();
}

sub _printit {
    print STDERR 'foo';
}
bannor:~/work/perl/monks$ perl 962552.pl 2>/dev/null
               Rate return it  print it
return it 1298701/s        --      -24%
print it  1703578/s       31%        --

[download]

Aaron B.
My Woefully Neglected Blog, where I occasionally mention Perl.

In reply to Re^2: Print Vs Return In a Subroutine by aaron_baugher
in thread Print Vs Return In a Subroutine by remya

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.