in reply to How do I unpack Perl floats in C

I've found that a major hotspot is in a read loop where results are being read in and unpacked:

my @row = unpack("FFFFL", $tchandle->get($curdate));

I bet if you wrote that as: 

my $packed = $tchandle->get($curdate);
my @row = unpack("FFFFL", $packed );

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and re-profiled, you'd find that it was the first line consuming the time, not the second.

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In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom