(I'm the one who posted the question...I can't get my logins here
to "take," and everything I post ends up under the name
"Anonymous Monk" whether I log in or not. Sigh...)

> My guess is that you were having to do some traversing
> of the array to look for a certain value

Yes, it was a case of<KBD> if ( $_ eq 'whatever' ) </KBD>while looping through the array.
I thought perhaps it'd be faster via "grep" (don't know why I thought so)--
it wasn't. The solution via hash was stunningly faster.

Thanks for these replies. I don't get all of it yet, but slowly, slowly...