Not the fastest? Let's see what we can do about it.

That's tail-end recursion, so it can be optimized:

sub equal {
   return 1 if @_ < 2;
   return 0 if $_[0] ne $_[1];
   shift;
   goto(&equal);
}
[download]

And the recursive call can be eliminated completely:

sub equal {
   while (@_ >= 2) {
      return 0 if $_[0] ne $_[1];
      shift;
   }
   return 1;
}
[download]

Benchmarks:

            Rate equal_pm  equal_i equal_i2
equal_pm 17854/s       --     -51%     -74%
equal_i  36454/s     104%       --     -46%
equal_i2 67523/s     278%      85%       --
[download]

Oh well, if we're going for speed:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use List::MoreUtils;
use Perl6::Junction;
use strict;
use warnings;

use Benchmark qw( cmpthese );

my @list = ('1')x10;

sub equal_pm {@_ < 2 || $_[0] eq $_[1] && equal_pm(@_[1..$#_])}

sub equal_i {
    return 1 if @_ < 2;
    return 0 if $_[0] ne $_[1];
    shift;
    goto(&equal_i);
}

sub equal_i2 {
    while (@_ >= 2) {
        return 0 if $_[0] ne $_[1];
        shift;
    }
    return 1;
}

sub equal_ti {
    return 1 if (Perl6::Junction::all(@_) eq $_[0]);
    return 0;
}

sub equal_fr {
    my $first = shift;
    for(@_) {
        return 0 unless $_ eq $first;
    }
    return 1;
}

sub equal_pw {
    return 1 if (List::MoreUtils::all { $_ eq $_[0] } @_);
    return 0;
}

sub equal_zx {
    my %hash;
    @hash{@_} = ();
    !(1 - keys %hash);
}

cmpthese(-3, {
              pm => sub { my $rv = equal_pm(@list) ?1:0; 1; },
              i1 => sub { my $rv = equal_i (@list) ?1:0; 1; },
              i2 => sub { my $rv = equal_i2(@list) ?1:0; 1; },
              pw => sub { my $rv = equal_pw(@list) ?1:0; 1; },
              ti => sub { my $rv = equal_ti(@list) ?1:0; 1; },
              fr => sub { my $rv = equal_fr(@list) ?1:0; 1; },
              zx => sub { my $rv = equal_zx(@list) ?1:0; 1; },
                        });
[download]

Which gives:

       Rate   pm   ti   i1   pw   i2   fr   zx
pm  52188/s   -- -30% -47% -69% -73% -78% -82%
ti  74488/s  43%   -- -24% -55% -61% -68% -74%
i1  97929/s  88%  31%   -- -41% -49% -58% -65%
pw 166481/s 219% 123%  70%   -- -13% -29% -41%
i2 192200/s 268% 158%  96%  15%   -- -18% -32%
fr 235585/s 351% 216% 141%  42%  23%   -- -17%
zx 283834/s 444% 281% 190%  70%  48%  20%   --
[download]

So friedo's solution (with some slight alterations for performance) wins.

Update:Included Zaxo's hash solution, all hail the new speed king!


Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian W. Kernighan