It's normally best to end recursive solutions with the recursive call. That allows the compiler to use tail-recursion to speed up the solution.
Of course, in Perl you need to jump through a few hoops to do use tail-recursion, so I mentioned but didn't include it in my original node. But with a bit if tinkering you can use it, and here it is now:
sub max {
my $max = shift;
my $next = shift;
return $max if not $next;
unshift @_, $max > $next ? $max : $next;
goto &max;
}
Which I estimate to be about 10x faster on a random 5000 element list. (Exact benchmarks are left to the reader as an exercise :-).
I wonder if Ponie (Perl 5 On New Internals Engine) will be able to detect and use tail-recursion.