And it came from the fact that I have been told to "save a Meg of RAM, not matter what it took".

Ah. Saving a meg of RAM is not a good reason to use parallel hashes for a complex problem, I can agree on that point. In fact, I've been known to save myself time by throwing an enormous partially-redundant hash at a problem thus consuming around a hundred megs of RAM where it would have been possible to use less than half that. Of course, that script only has to run once a year, so it isn't worth optimising -- which I think is really what this discussion came to be about: knowing when something is worth doing and when it isn't.

And don't let word get back to your employer that you are overpaid :-)

sub H{$_=shift;while($_){$c=0;while(s/^2//){$c++;}s/^4//;$
v.=(' ','|','_',"\n",'\\','/')[$c]}$v}sub A{$_=shift;while
($_){$d=hex chop;for(1..4){$pl.=($d%2)?4:2;$d>>=1}}$pl}$H=
"16f6da116f6db14b4b0906c4f324";print H(A($H)) # -- jonadab
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