Well I think you are getting into premature optimization. I would focus on cleaning up your code and making it more maintable before you look at speeding it up.

Right off the bat your (lack of) indenting makes it almost impossible to follow your code (Thanks emacs and perl-mode).

If you had warnings turned on you would see that you are using single element array slices (bad ju-ju). You are not using strict.

You break some (IMO) important idioms. Particularly using upper case for filehandles (DICT). This would also turn off some bareword warnings. Use $_. It makes your code more readable, sort of like pronouns.

Please do not mix you main program logic with your subroutines. This makes it very hard to follow.

You should also pass you vars into subroutines and avoid using globals in your subs. 
sub word {
    my $word;
    foreach $word ( @{ $wordpl{$l} } ) {
        my $oword=$word; #define original word
        my $p=$l-1;
        word1($p, $word);
    }
}

[download]
Here $l and %wordpl are in the main package not passed into your sub.

I would also recommend reading perlstyle. It goes into more detail than I willing to go into in this post.

As a final note - these suggestions not only help you debug your code, but it helps other PM's read your code so they can offer better advice.

grep
grep> chown linux:users /world

In reply to Re: Add-A-Gram Performance by grep
in thread Add-A-Gram Performance by smgfc

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