Well she ' s dead so I ' m gonna go out on a limb and say no . <| sep |> no more reign had 2 . <| sep |> No veo la tele , se vive mejor . <| sep |> Ruby String eval i . e . # have even lower performance than operator , probably due to parsing overhead . I think but I ' m not sure that thinking # involves parsing is a common misconception . a # c comes out of the parser as a b c there ' s no runtime parsing . The reason that the time for arithmetic operations are nonlinear is that your processor can automatically parallelise arithmetic operations . If you have abcd , it ' ll run ab and cd in parallel in the right conditions , and to be honest I ' m not sure Ruby will give you the right condition due to the interpreter overhead , so your results could just be measurement noise you need to measure that noise by the way .