No, not yet. My first perl program actually works as expected :) Just concerned about wasting CPU cycles, is all.

My first exposure to OO programming was Actor, a commercial implementation of smalltalk, which I really liked a lot except for how slow it was. To add 2+2, the number 2 had to send a message to 2 telling it to add itself to 2. Ever since I've fretted about concepts like 'early binding' and useless conversions of formats inside loops and such.

I should say I'm astonished at the speed and depth of all the replies to my newbie question and I'm very grateful to all of you. That's the best help in the shortest time I've ever seen, and I've learned good stuff from every reply. Thanks!