See, there’s a difference. perl is invoked hundreds of millions of times every day. It pays to microoptimise that. I doubt the scripts the OP writes get that sort of work-over.

It’s always a matter of tradeoffs and diminishing returns in various forms of expenditure.

Personally, I always try to write code that doesn’t do unnecessary work; this is mostly a question of cultivating algorithmic sensitivity and understanding how things work under the hood. But I only actually start worrying about performance when the performance gets worrisome.

Makeshifts last the longest.