Hello all around and thank you for your comments. Several contain excellent suggestions, and some make the larger (and correct) point that I'm barking up the wrong tree. Time to re-think the data structure.

The root issue is that I'm trying to use a hash to implement a C-style struct with pointers. Bad karma to think this way in the Monastery, no?

Background: I'm trying to implement an n-level Markov chain that's efficient enough to handle large data sets. My hope was to use the words in the chain as hash keys, then build the rest of the data structure (except the weights of following words, which are ints) using arrays and references. There is another node dealing with the general issue of Markov chains, so I'll hold off on posting more here. Anyone who's interested in the topic, though, is welcome to join me over there. I'll post what I come up with (after doing some more thinking) then look forward to feedback.

Once again, thank you to everyone who posted. These were very helpful comments.

In reply to Re: Given ref to hash value, retrieve the key by gazpacho
in thread Given ref to hash value, retrieve the key by gazpacho

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