But! since you wrote

My script has the global $verbosity which is set by command line args.

I ask - does this value change ever after? Because if not, you can make that a static via

BEGIN {
     my $verbosity = shift; # or Getopts::Std, whatever...
     eval "sub verbose () { $verbosity }";
}
[download]

of course only after examining under severe scrutiny what $verbosity holds (untaint, perlsec).

Since the BEGIN block is a separate compile & run, the sub is defined and a constant sub after that, and its value can be used for optimizations. If the values you compare $verbose with are plain numbers as the 1 in

print "Holy Crap = $holy_crap\n" if $verbose >= 1;
[download]

then optimization should work, because then you have constant vs. constant comparisons. Let's see...

qwurx [shmem] ~ > perl -MO=Deparse,-x,-p - 1
BEGIN { 
    my $verbose;
    1 while ($verbose = shift) !~ /^\d$/; # get rid of -MO=Dep...
    eval "sub verbose () { $verbose }";
}
print "Holy Crap = $holy_crap\n" if verbose >= 1;
__END__
sub BEGIN {
    my($verbose);
    '???' while (not (($verbose = shift(@ARGV)) =~ /^\d$/));
    eval("sub verbose () { $verbose }");
}
print("Holy Crap = $holy_crap\n");
__DATA__
- syntax OK

qwurx [shmem] ~ > perl -MO=Deparse,-x,-p - 0
BEGIN { 
    my $verbose;
    1 while ($verbose = shift) !~ /^\d$/; # get rid of -MO=Dep...
    eval "sub verbose () { $verbose }";
}
print "Holy Crap = $holy_crap\n" if verbose >= 1;
__END__
sub BEGIN {
    my($verbose);
    '???' while (not (($verbose = shift(@ARGV)) =~ /^\d$/));
    eval("sub verbose () { $verbose }");
}
'???';      <----- hooray! gone :-)
__DATA__
- syntax OK
[download]

bingo :-)

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