11/24   I was looking at the Perl CGI.pm and I noticed that most of its
        functions existed only as source code stored in a big hash of
        %SUBS = (sub_name => 'sub source')  What's the reason for doing this?
        \_ They compile the functions on demand, to reduce startup time.
           \_ So if you make repeated calls to some of these functions, will
              you see much of a performance hit?
              \_ Nope -- once CGI.pm compiles a function, it becomes an
                 ordinary perl function with no extra overhead.  On the other
                 hand, even that single compilation is a waste if you're using
                 something like mod_perl that precompiles your code, so CGI.pm
                 does have an option (-compile) to disable the hack and just
                 define everything at compile time.  --mconst