You have made some interesting points and I have sympathy with some of them. However,

He needs to fully understand it

You are falling into the error of assuming how much kevyt does or does not know. He does not say whether he is a beginner or much more advanced and I'm not sure you can divine too much from the question; tr is often misunderstood. I am wary of offending people by replying to their posts at too elementary a level. If they do not understand at first they are at perfect liberty to post a reply asking for a fuller explanation. Only if an OP says "I'm completely new to Perl" do I think it appropriate to reply straight away with what amounts to a mini-tutorial.

this is a site that offers help (to beginners?)

This is a site that offers help to all. I have seen Monks as experienced as japhy and Ovid posting questions in recent weeks. I think responses should always be helpful but certain audiences would not find simple code examples with detailed explanations helpful at all but rather offensive. Imagine explaining to Edison how a light bulb worked.

Basically, what you did was giving him some code and hoping that he would either understand it or look it up.

Not at all. I gave a basic solution, cleanly laid out. It depends on the individual but, personally, I find I gain more from other Monk's replies if I have a crack at trying to figure out what they are doing for myself rather than just reading the explanatory text. I hope that kevyt understood my post but I hope more that, if not, she or he would post again to say, "Didn't quite get that, could you explain further." I'd be only too pleased to do so.

Benchmarking on different platforms can always throw up surprises. There seems to be something about SPARC that favours map. I am guessing (from the law of averages) that you are on an AMD or Intel platform. I wonder if other RISC architectures (Alpha or HP-PA for example) would mirror SPARC.

I have enjoyed exploring our philosophical differences. It has made me think about how I should answer posts.

Cheers,

JohnGG

Update: Fixed typo