This is untrue. As more elements get added to perl hashes, more buckets get added and the chances of hash collisions increase. Both of these aspects lead to a logarithmic increaese in the amount of work needed to acces the average key-value pair. You could always predeclare a large hash or array to get rid of pregressive bucket costs, but this only hides the loagirthmic increase in a large constant mutiplier; for sufficiently large N, it will start growing logarithmically again.

The good news is that logarithmic growth is not bad at all, and people use larges hashes and sort large arrays all the time without much problem.

-Mark

In reply to Re^3: Designing a cache data structure by kvale
in thread Designing a cache data structure by spurperl

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