The size of a scalar has a minimum overhead. Anything below about 20 characters (guess) in length requires the same amount of memory
Er, no. A scalar that is only ever used as a number will use less memory than a scalar used as a string (even one of zero length). 
$ perl -e 'push @a, 1 for 1..100000; system"ps -flp $$"'
....  SZ 
.... 608
$ perl -e 'push @a, "" for 1..100000; system"ps -flp $$"'
....  SZ
.... 905

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In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Weighting rand() by dave_the_m
in thread Weighting rand() by hacker

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