I just don’t like “clever solutions” anymore.   The strategy that always seems to work best, at least for yours truly, is to find the simplest and most-obvious way to write code that expresses what you truly mean to say.   Then, let the mighty Perl interpreter do the rest.   After all, microprocessors are never going to slow down anytime soon.   They’ll only become faster.   But software maintenance and development costs will only increase.   And it will be the “clever” solutions, i.e. “the ones that surely must have mightily impressed the programmer himself,” that will bite you in the a*s first.   (Usually at three o’clock in the morning.)