You mentioned that to me a little over 5 years ago when I had about 5 months of perl under my belt. In retrospect, I think my problem was two fold. The first issue I had was that I didn't take the time to understand what your code was doing so when it wasn't fast enough, I didn't understand how to adapt it. The second part is that I did know that fewer ops usually means less work which usually means faster run time. I was a bit naive about achieving the fewer ops.

I try not to make that mistake anymore.