Hashes with dispatch tables (slow sub calls) and if-elsif-chains (slow linear testing) shouldn't be as fast as this approach.

Dear Rolf, I know that you are interested in functional programming possibilities in Perl, so please stop taking for granted what HOP opponents are hammering constantly. Subroutine calls of course add some time penalty, but not as much as many people think or say. In fact, as soon as the routine is really doing something, the sub call penalty becomes almost anecdotal or even almost negligible compared to the rest or the processing. In the benchmark below, the dispatch table ranks second best, immediately after direct array search, although it does really nothing more than returning a value.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark  qw/cmpthese/;
my @translation = qw / Zero One Two Three/;
my %trans = (1 => "One", 2 => "Two", 3 => "Three");
my @dispatch = ( sub {return "Zero"}, sub {return "One"}, sub {return 
+"Two"}, sub {return "Three"} );

sub test1 {
    my $var2 = shift;
    return ("One")    if ($var2 =~ /^1/ );
    return ("Two")    if ($var2 =~ /^2/ );
    return ("Three")  if ($var2 =~ /^3/ );
    return undef;
}
sub test2 {
    my $var2 = substr shift, 0, 1;
    return ("One")    if ($var2 == 1 );
    return ("Two")    if ($var2 == 2 );
    return ("Three")  if ($var2 == 3 );
    return undef;
}
sub test3 {
    return $translation[(substr shift, 0, 1)];
}
sub test4 {
    my $var = shift;
    return $trans{$1} if $var =~ /^(\d)\./ ;
}
sub test5 {
    my $var = substr shift, 0, 1;
    eval { goto "_$var" }    or
        return "Other"; 
    _1: return "One"  ;
    _2: return "Two"  ; 
    _3: return "Three"; 
}
sub test6 {
    return $dispatch[(substr shift, 0, 1)]->();
}
    
cmpthese( -1,
    {
    _linear_1      => q {test1("2.01.000")},
    _linear_2      => q {test2("2.01.000")},
    _array         => q {test3("2.01.000")},
    _hash_regex    => q {test4("2.01.000")},
    _goto          => q {test5("2.01.000")},
    _dispatch      => q {test6("2.01.000")},
    }
)
[download]

And the results:

$ perl test_if.pl
                 Rate _hash_regex     _goto linear_1 linear_2 _dispatc
+h   _array
_hash_regex  831494/s          --      -29%     -46%     -52%      -54
+%     -70%
_goto       1173439/s         41%        --     -24%     -32%      -36
+%     -57%
_linear_1    1538868/s         85%       31%       --     -10%      -1
+6%     -44%
_linear_2    1714704/s        106%       46%      11%       --       -
+6%     -37%
_dispatch   1827212/s        120%       56%      19%       7%        -
+-     -33%
_array      2735932/s        229%      133%      78%      60%       50
+%       --
[download]

The dispatch table approach, with its sub call penalty, is 33% slower than the direct array access, but still quicker than any of the other tested approaches.