http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=556854


in reply to Re^4: Best practice or cargo cult?
in thread Best practice or cargo cult?

Well there are two reasons why I wouldnt do it this way. The first is that doing this afaict adds a high cost to compiling regexes in the scope where the overload takes effect. The second is that special metasequences like we are discussing can be handled much more efficiently by the regex engine. So for instance a NEOL regop would be a lot more efficient both in terms of storage and execution than the ANYOF regop that [^\n] is converted to.

The ANYOF is implemented by a bitmap lookup with flags, meaning it requires more than 32 bytes to represent, and for each character inspected requires a set of bit shifting to do the correct bitmap test. Wheras an NEOL regop would be much faster as it would essentially be a straight character inequality test. Also an NEOL regop would be just 4 bytes iirc.

---
$world=~s/war/peace/g