++ Right on! Not only would it eliminate the sort, the resulting data structure would be no glorified hash (tilly don't consider a balanced tree one, I'm agreeing after a few /tell's), but a fulll fledged sorted balanced binary tree (extra efficiency in lookups).

And now, my favorite activity besides programming, quoting from the pod:

DB_BTREE

The btree format allows arbitrary key/value pairs to be stored in a sorted, balanced binary tree. As with the DB_HASH format, it is possible to provide a user defined Perl routine to perform the comparison of keys. By default, though, the keys are stored in lexical order.

update
as for building the matrix, see what japhy said (it's got to do with how perl grows the array).

The BTree will definetly help, but I'm not sure how noticably ... you might wanna look at the DB_Fille pod for an alternate method of accessing the key/value pairs (like the seq method), or use the BerkleyDB module.

Question: Evanovich, how are you benchmarking this?

Suggestion: If you, with the help of the monks, don't figure out how to optimize this sufficiently, you might wanna consider a C/C++ solution. BerkleyDB has a C/C++ interface, and your code isn't too complex/long ... please don't hurt me ;)(/duck)

 

______crazyinsomniac_____________________________ Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most. perl -e "$q=$_;map({chr unpack qq;H*;,$_}split(q;;,q*H*));print;$q/$q;"

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