How does fat comma => affect performance or memory usage?

The fat comma (=>) in Perl is commonly used to associate keys and values in hash data structures. While the performance implications are generally minimal, there are certain scenarios where its usage can have an impact. For instance, when creating hashes with a large number of elements, using fat comma can be slightly faster than using the traditional comma (,) due to less ambiguity in parsing. Additionally, since it represents a key-value pair, it can improve code clarity and potentially reduce memory overhead in certain situations due to better optimization by Perl’s interpreter.

Below is an example demonstrating how the fat comma is used in Perl to create a hash:

$hash = ( 'name' => 'John Doe', 'age' => 30, 'email' => 'john.doe@example.com' );

Perl fat comma performance memory usage hash data structures key-value pairs