Not clear why you want to do this (less memory usage maybe?), but one way of eliminating $Record would be to store your top N results in a hash, as follows. This means you still need to record 40 entries from $Record, but that's fewer than a thousand, right? An explanation of your motivation might help… 

my %results;
foreach (1 .. 40) {
    my $hit = int rand(30);
    my $id = int rand(1000);
    $results{$id} = [ $id, $hit ]; # Store ID and hit in array
}

foreach (0 .. 999) {
    my $data = int rand(100);
# Only stack data we're interested in:
    if(exists($results{$_})) {
      push @{$results{$_}}, $data;
    }
}
# Sort by descending hit (array[1] entry):
my @search_results = sort { $b->[1] <=> $a->[1] } values %results;

foreach (@search_results) {
    my ($hit, $id, $data) = @$_;
    print "$hit $id $data\n";
}

[download]

… and if you're into more variable elimination, @search_results can go easily too — but since it's an array of array references, it takes up next to no space so you'd lose clarity for little gain.

The [ $id, $hit ], @{$results{$_}}, $b->[1] and @$_ stuff are all explained in the Perl references documentation (“perldoc perlref”).

In reply to Re: Joining data structures. by conrad
in thread Joining data structures. by artist

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.