I should have been a little more explicit about what I meant by "verbose", but I was too interested in what everyone else had to say.

Some of the code I was assigned was written by someone who didn't understand how to restrict scope in Perl, or specify global information. As a result, every subroutine had 15 parameters. To say this made understanding his code difficult is an understatement.

Another former collegue never used subroutines. *sigh*

I appreciate your comments on "verbose code is not slow code" and will try to keep them in mind. It is a fallacy I have fallen into.