One thought that you may want to consider is that when working on legacy code often written by many people with different coding styles and conventions is that a quick run through perltidy will at least produce a consistent indentation and code formatting style. It will also catch and highlight a number of "dubious" practices that perl will not.

I use it routinely nowadays...

Yves / DeMerphq
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Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.