After a solid night's sleep I managed to come up with the following implementation that generates the permutations in the desired order without a separate sort step: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

# set up the initial 5 arrays into @a
my @a=([0..2],[0..2],[0..2],[0..2],[0..2]);

# build non-zero versions of those arrays
my @nz=map {[grep {$_ != 0} @$_]} @a;

# permute in order....
my @foo;
foreach (15,14,13,11,7,12,10,6,9,5,3,8,4,2,1,0){
  push @foo,@{permute('',
                ($_ & 0x01)?$nz[0]:[0],
                ($_ & 0x02)?$nz[1]:[0],
                $a[2],
                ($_ & 0x04)?$nz[3]:[0],
                ($_ & 0x08)?$nz[4]:[0]);}
}

# print out results
print "$_\n" for (@foo);

# permute lists recursively 
sub permute{
  my ($prefix,$c,@arrays)=@_;
  my @ret=();
  foreach(@$c){
    my $f=$prefix.$_;
    if(scalar(@arrays)==0){
      push @ret,$f;
    }else{
      push @ret,@{permute($f,@arrays)};
    }
  }
  return \@ret;
}

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In reply to Re: How can I improve this? by lhoward
in thread How can I improve this? by Dogg

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