in reply to Re^4: Generating Unique numbers from Unique strings
in thread Generating Unique numbers from Unique strings

An array access by index will be faster than a hash table lookup, but not by all that much unless you do this a bazillion times.

Accessing an array is measurably, and for some things substantially, faster than accessing a hash; but the big problems with using an array for the OPs usage are:

  1. Creating an array that has 4 billion slots;
  2. Or truncating the 32-bit value to some more reasonable size and then dealing with collisions.

Perl's hashes take care of this; and do so very efficiently.

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Re^6: Generating Unique numbers from Unique strings
by Marshall (Canon) on Apr 03, 2016 at 19:56 UTC
    I agree completely.
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