I don't recall saying it was efficient. It just makes sense as you pointed out:

the ease of using a hash instead of a module that will provide OO representation for you overrides the benefits of not using a hash so.... Yes, right?

How one arrives at such a conclusion is not really important.

I read that "all objects from an array" in one of O'Reilly's advanced perl books too. Having looked at the code required to maintain objects as arrays and the inability to play nicely with serialization tools like Data::Dumper was a real turn off.

Besides, I think the post below referencing the "stash" is probably more correct that anything thus far.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: What is a "stash"? by Cabrion
in thread What is a "stash"? by John M. Dlugosz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.