in reply to Conquering "x" operator over-optimization

No, it's doing what you told it to do. You've taken a hashref, and made 5 copies of the reference with "x". What you probably wanted was a deep copy, not a shallow copy.

However, for this example, you can cheat with a map instead of an "x":

my @x = map +{a => 3, b => 4}, 1..5;

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.