This is just a guess (perhaps somebody who's more experienced with Perl compiler optimizations can help out here). Since accessing array elements tends to be faster than accessing hash elements, if the Perl compiler resolves the pseudo-hash keys to the array indexes at compile-time, it makes building structures with named elements more efficient at run-time than simply using hashes.

The perlref page notes that the compiler does something to this effect for using named fields in objects. I'm not at all familiar with objects in Perl, so I can't really elaborate on that.

- Zoogie

In reply to RE: RE: RE: RE: My views on pseudohashes by Zoogie
in thread My views on pseudohashes by vroom

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