I had a situation once where I needed to switch on 14 or 15 possible variable values. It made more sense to me to to write a hash of function refs. I never benchmarked it for speed, but I sure found it much easier to maintain over the long term, especially as the requirements for each possible variable changed. Something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$func_refs = { '1' => \&f1, '2' => \&f2, '3' => \&f3 };

&{ $func_refs->{$arg} };

sub f1() {
   #do something
}

sub f2() {
   # do something
}
.......
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davidj