Says tye:

> I recall old documentation talking about simple
> if/elsif/else being internally optimized into a
> case/switch type of flow control.

Perl 4 did that, but the feature was lost in Perl 5.

Every once in a while someone suggests adding it back to Perl 5, and what happens next is that everyone jumps in and suggests one stupid bonus feature after another. "Oh, it should do XYZ also." "Yes, and PDQ as well." After that, it sounds too complicated so nobody wants to do it.

Damian Conway has an implementation of a switch statement based on source filters, but I think all it does is compile your code into an if-elsif internally; you don't get the optimization that you would get in C.