First, in your rule you are using "=" to do a string comparison. Don't do that. use eq.

I have a similar program which reads rules from a xml-file and applies them to a bunch of data. I do compile those rules into anonymous subroutines and call them later on. That is far faster then evaling the same code over and over again. Like so:

# @rules read from file or somewhere else
my @rules = 
(
    'return( "A", "Cat A" ) if $_[0] < 75000 and $_[1] eq "ICE";',
    #...
);

# convert rules to anon subs
@rules = map { eval "\$_ = sub { $_ }"; } @rules;

for ( @rules )
{
  print join ",", &$_(20000, "ICE"); #A, Cat A
}
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