in reply to Re: Re: Counting incidents of names in a file
in thread Counting incidents of names in a file

That's like saying I like Carpentry but I don't like drills. Then you spend your time trying to bore a hole with your screwdriver, the cabinet takes for ever to build and it's not all that sturdy.
Or, I'm going to write a novel, but I'm not going to use adjectives.
Hashes are one of the basic tools of the language. You wouldn't code a large C project without pointers, would you?
Problems that would be innefficient using arrays like existance checks and counting occurances are quick and painless with hashes. And order is as simple as:
foreach (sort keys %hash) { my $item = $hash{$_}; ... }
Not much worse than:
foreach my $item (@array) { ... }
Plus there is no effort involved in inserting and delete and maintaining order.
I usually judge the progress of junior perl programmers by their use of hashes. When they stop trying to use arrays to do the job of a hash, they've leveled up in perl. (BTW, regexp are the second tier, then map/grep)
Of course this is all just my opinion,

-pete
Entropy is not what is used to be.