That's a mighty good permutation algorithm you're using. I'm curious as to where you came across it. (A few years ago I did a fair bit of investigation into permutation generation, and this algorithm was the fastest pure-Perl one I could find by quite a margin. Your code looks remarkably similar to mine!)

That was a subroutine I had found on the web a while ago when I was looking for how to do fast permutations. I didn't really remember exactly where I got it, (I had stored it away in my folder of cool and interesting perl stuff,) but in looking at your web page, there is little doubt that it was from there. Sorry for not attributing it correctly, and thank you for making it available.