I'm sorry I did not get what you were asking. I just thought you were asking what I would use if I generated the index values in a Perlish way instead of a C-stylish way. Wasn't thinking about the optimization at all. It's been over six years since I used the range operator in a loop (or outside of one for that matter). And with the smart operator in Perl 5.10+ there's even less reason to use it because I usually work off of hashes or arrays with data that I can loop over. So Tilly has it right.