The mindset is indeed important. And it's very important to program in a language that fits ones mindset. If your mindset is that microseconds are important, Perl is the wrong language for you.

As for the actual differences:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Benchmark 'cmpthese';

our @array = (1 .. 1000);

foreach my $x (1 .. 10) {
    cmpthese -1, {
        alias    => 'my $c = 0; foreach (@array) {$c += $_}',
        variable => 'my $d = 0; foreach my $var (@array) {$d += $var}'
+,
    };
}
__END__
           Rate    alias variable
alias    3139/s       --      -3%
variable 3230/s       3%       --
           Rate    alias variable
alias    3139/s       --      -2%
variable 3199/s       2%       --
           Rate    alias variable
alias    3139/s       --      -0%
variable 3140/s       0%       --
           Rate    alias variable
alias    3140/s       --      -0%
variable 3143/s       0%       --
           Rate    alias variable
alias    3110/s       --      -5%
variable 3262/s       5%       --
           Rate    alias variable
alias    3083/s       --      -5%
variable 3229/s       5%       --
           Rate    alias variable
alias    3131/s       --      -3%
variable 3229/s       3%       --
           Rate    alias variable
alias    3083/s       --      -5%
variable 3229/s       5%       --
           Rate variable    alias
variable 2821/s       --     -10%
alias    3140/s      11%       --
           Rate    alias variable
alias    3140/s       --      -2%
variable 3200/s       2%       --
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Assembler programmers wouldn't program in Perl.

Yes they would :)

I see what you mean, I did not know I could use a for instead of a foreach. I will look into this. Thanks.

-- Detonite