Hello, I'm back with my findings ! In my case, I'm getting the columned data from a file and I've benchmarked global unpacks with file slurping against real-time settings of the different variables by specific sequential read statements: the second solution is always faster ! And I guess this is simply due to the efficient I/O read buffer provided with my Linux Ubuntu OpSys... Many thanks anyway for all your pertinent remarks, as ever, which learned to me a lot about our beloved programming language, Perl of course :-) Bye now, Germain