in reply to Lining up many hash values

I agree with robartes, using hashes for this application is basically the wrong way to do it. It would seem that the only reason you are using the hash is to give meaningful names to the values. An alternative is to use constant names for the array elements via the constant pragma.

However, its not clear from your snippet whether you are generating the hashes (in which case you could re-work the hashes to arrays) or whether these are being generated by a module which would make life harder.

You might also look at Tie::IxHash which will always return the values in the order the keys were created, but there is a performance penalty associated with this which, if the hashes are small might outweight the benefits of avoiding sorting. And again, if the hashes are being generated in a module, it could be awkward to persuade it/them to use Tie::IxHash.


Examine what is said, not who speaks.
1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke.