Okay, so here's the deal
I need a data structure that will store 2-7 data points (these points will be numbers from 0-50 with none repeated) in such a way as to preserve the order of the data points, and to make look up on a specific point easy.

I'm going to address the second part first, to make this easy for me, I'm tempted to put these items into a hash and use exists. eg.
sub find_point(){
    my $ref = shift;
    my %hash = %$ref;
    my $key = shift;
    if(exists($hash{$key})){
        ...
    }
}

[download]

While this would be an ideal solution for finding a key quickly, trying to order the data based on the values associated with those keys seems to be quite a bit of extra effort. Eg.
sub points_list(){
    my $ref = shift;
    my %hash = %$ref;
    my @order;
    foreach $item (keys %hash){
        @order[int($hash{$item})]=$item;
    }
    return \@order;
}

[download]

Now this wouldn't be so bad, but it may be done on a number of hashes like this. Does anyone see a better way?
==
Kwyjibo. A big, dumb, balding North American ape. With no chin.

In reply to I Ordered My Keys With Existing Values! by abitkin

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