I agree with the general sentiment that clarity and maintainability trump any (mis-guided) concerns for “efficiency.”

Any Perl code that you write is going to be compiled into some kind of intermediate-format, which is what the computer actually executes. You have no control over that. What does matter, both to you and to those who'll come back from your funeral, is that the meaning of your code is abundantly clear and that it is drop-dead easy to maintain. (A good thing, since you just dropped dead. Oops.)   ;-)