List::Utils is great and was one the reasons I got around to upgrading. It replaced about half the routines in my personal utils module. The problem is that I need the min and max of each dataset, and iterating each dataset twice isn't ideal with huge datasets.

I agree with your reduction when the array is of a reasonable size, but each dataset is 786,432 elements, there are several datasets and the operation isn't a one-off, so building a list in the for loop is kind of expensive I think? Hence the choice to use the lazy evaluation of the range op in a for loop to index the elements. That problem goes away once we get lazy-evaluating in P6.

It still irks me that I have to type the operands, to what is essentially a binary operation, twice each, but it seems I'm the only one who sees that as a problem, and I don't relish causing, let alone being involved in, a 3 year p5p flame fest which I was told above is what it took to get ||= implemented:(.

It's the same "I know that everything is available in the cpu for the processing required" type ire that I feel about the need to do

my $n;
my ($div, $rem) = ( int($n/10), $n % 10 );
[download]

as I pontificated on at A better mod (%) operator?. It's not a "performance thing",

 my ($div, %rem) = $n %% 10;

just seems cleaner. That I know that both values are available in the registers after either / or % means that even hiding the double division within a sub or overloading % or whatever still doesn't satisfy my sense of "once and once only:)