Modified davorg's code accordingly. Some improvement, clearly:

Benchmark: timing 50000 iterations of hybrid, join, slash...
    hybrid:  4 secs ( 2.90 usr  0.38 sys =  3.28 cpu)
      join:  6 secs ( 5.65 usr  0.35 sys =  6.00 cpu)
     slash:  3 secs ( 1.95 usr  0.38 sys =  2.33 cpu)
[download]

Cheers,

Jeroen
I was dreaming of guitarnotes that would irritate an executive kind of guy (FZ)