note moritz <p>While it might be a single instruction, I'm pretty sure the number of ticks that is used up is still proportional to the length of the strings - you just can't wrap an O(n) operation in O(1) with finite hardware. <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-616540"> [http://perl6.org/|Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed] </div></div> 969839 969938