Thanks again but I couldn't get Hobo to do it. I'm just a humble pilgrim in the Holy Land of MCE. Thanks to the seemingly infinite amount of elaborate example code I have tried many things. As you will see below my cargo cult strategy simply replaces numbers with letters to see if it works. MCE::Candy caught my eye for preserving output order because my old method did that, even thought it's not necessary. I found the magic in MCE::Candy::out_iter_array: 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use MCE;
use MCE::Candy;

my $volume      = 26*26;
my $max_workers = 4;
my $chunk_size  = int $volume / $max_workers;
my @results;

my $mce = MCE->new(
   max_workers => $max_workers,
   chunk_size  => $chunk_size,
   gather => MCE::Candy::out_iter_array(\@results),
   user_func => sub {
      my ($mce, $chunk_ref, $chunk_id) = @_;
      my @output;
      foreach my $item (@{ $chunk_ref }) {
         push @output, $item++;
      }
      $mce->gather($chunk_id, @output);
   }
);

$mce->process([ 'aa' .. 'zz' ]);

print "$_, " for @results;
print scalar @results, "\n";

[download]
https://github.com/marioroy/mce-perl/blob/master/README.md

In reply to Re^4: Getting started with MCE (the Many-Core Engine) by Anonymous Monk
in thread Getting started with MCE (the Many-Core Engine) by Anonymous Monk

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