Perhaps I'm over-analyzing this, but it seems to me that because perl is an interpreted language, that assertions will provide minimal speed up. When I go to execute a script, perl parses my code, compiles it, and then runs it. From what I understand, an assertion is optimized away at compile time, which (for traditional invocation) happens every time. I suppose the longer running the script, the more benefit there is in something like this. On the other hand, perhaps I'm missing the point completely...:-)
thor