On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 12:17 PM, Nigel Peck <nigel.p...@miswebdesign.com> wrote: > Mark Morgan wrote: >> >> On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Nigel Peck <nigel.p...@miswebdesign.com> >> wrote: >>> >>> When the list could be empty, which is faster? >>> >>> if ( @list ) { foreach ( @list ) { } } >>> >>> - or just - >>> >>> foreach ( @list ) { } >>> >>> Or is it a pointless question? >> >> Sounds like a definite case of premature optimisation. If it's not >> causing issues for production code, ignore it. If it is, then there's >> very likely much bigger problems.... > > I'm just asking because I try to think about optimisation as I'm writing > code, rather than going back and doing it later, which I've only done in > rare cases. >
It's more important to get your algorithms right than this kind of edge-case peephole work. It's also important in a different way to write code that doesn't leave other developers (or yourself, six months from now) looking at, if (@list) { foreach my $element (@list) { ... and thinking "WTF?!" (because that is a very reasonable reaction to seeing that code) P