DaWolf,
If the block only contained one statement, I would do:

print "hello" for 1 .. $messages;
[download]

If it was a multi-statement block, I would use:

for ( 1 .. $messages ) {
    ...
}
[download]

I am not an internals person, so I can not attest to how many more operations testing less than is in comparison to less than or equal to, but I can tell you that premature optimization is often futile and any language where this made a noticeable difference probably isn't worth using.

If you are a C style for loop fanatic and you really want to Benchmark the difference, compare it to this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $messages = 10_000;
my $limit = $messages + 1;

for ( my $i = 1; $i < $limit; $i++ ) {
    ...
}
[download]

Cheers - L~R