Quoting Parrot Raiser <1parr...@gmail.com>:
Round trips to the OS, like repeated "says", have been slow relative to internal processes since the dawn of time.
In this case, there are no trips. It's the *parsing* time that's slow. In fact, if you change it to `$ = ‘a’;` it's equally slow.
Looking at this now, with an extra year of knowledge, it makes perfect sense for this to be unusually slower: each line switches back and forth from Main language braid, to Quote language braid, and then back to Main.
For a core developer it's kinda hard to forget about parsing being slow anyway :)
Indeed, we all pay a ~70s of wait time to parse core code after *every* change.
I'm actually debugging a bug that requires me to learn how the braid switcher works; I'll take a look if the switch can be improved—don't hold your breath tho, I'm a n00b.
