> or if those things are slow but not due to CPU-boundedness, > i.e. if they comprise responding to network connections

yes, ultimately this will wind up fetching urls with WWW::Mechanize. I was doing this with LWP::Parallel::UserAgent, but doing things this way ties me to that particular user agent, and the more I use it the more I pine for WWW::Mechanize, which makes so many things so easy.

But really, my goal is to gain an understanding for how to take arbitrary code and "parallelize" it. I've been reading a lot of lisp propaganda lately, and if we were in lisp world there would probably be a macro to do the transformation of the code. But we're not, so the macro has to be my brain... ah, to turn code a into code b I have to do such and so. That kind of understanding is actually what I'm after.