Two suggestions:

• Your jewel should accept an array ref instead of array, especially when you already have an array ref, to flatten it before passing slows things down and is less beautiful ;-) Update: to add benchmark.

  use Benchmark qw/timethese/;
  
  use strict;
  use warnings;
  
  my $array = [1..10000];
  
  timethese(10000, {"straight" => sub {straight($array)}, "flatten" => s
  +ub {flatten(@$array)}});
  
  sub straight {
      ;
  }
  
  sub flatten {
      ;
  }
  [download]

  Benchmark: timing 10000 iterations of flatten, straight...
     flatten:  6 wallclock secs ( 5.08 usr +  0.00 sys =  5.08 CPU) @ 19
  +69.28/s (n
  =10000)
    straight:  0 wallclock secs ( 0.00 usr +  0.00 sys =  0.00 CPU)
              (warning: too few iterations for a reliable count)
  [download]

• Never include data in your program. Code is code, program is program. With a language like Perl, it might be less obvious why you should not mix them. But with other languages that need to be compiled, you don't want to recompile your program everytime when the data is changed. Perl might go down that path though.