Says samtregar:

I found this to be 300% faster over 100,000 iterations. Not bad, but I bet we could do better!

Supposing that the original version took 10 seconds to run, then yours, 300% faster, completes and delivers the answer 20 seconds before you even enter the command that runs it. That is an impressive achievement indeed. I admire your optimization skills.

Perhaps you meant that yours was three times as fast? If so, it was 66.67% faster, not 300%.

Hope this helps.

--
Mark Dominus
Perl Paraphernalia