I think you're wasting way too many brain cycles trying to save CPU cycles. I was heavy into assembly programming for a while and used to be the same way; however at some point your realize that 10,000 clock cycles just aren't worth the 3 hours extra work. If you're really so bent on speed as to mind every last CPU cycle, how did you end up with Perl?

> #while(1) psuedo-loop
> {
Isn't this kind of the worst of both worlds? You have to type out the while anyway, in addition to the redo, and get the horrible maintainability of the naked block you're using. And you also have to maintain all your pseudocode comments to match the actual code. I can't think of any way to make things more awkward.

To your subrant: smack them over the head if they don't use indentation. I don't care about exact formatting habits like where people put their curlies and whether their else's are cuddled, but indentation is an iron rule.

while(1) is misleading only to a person who has never seen this idiom before, while it is the most efficient way to signal "infinite loop" to someone who's spent any amount of time writing Perl. Personally, the moment I see that idiom, I know what's going on without even thinking. Learning these idioms is what makes you good at a language.

Questioning accepted good practice is a good way of thinking; throwing accepted good practice out of the window just for the sake of doing things differently, in your own style, is not. I used to question everything and often went about things my own way. In the end I discovered that I only repeated mistakes others had made before and which had led them to establish those accepted good practices I dismissed. Tradition becomes tradition, because it actually works well, not because everyone just does it that way. Sometimes, straying from it is good; but someone who is too quick to dismiss it will not stay true to his new, "better" rules for long either.