What you are talking about sounds like what a BTree is for. You can get it done in Perl, use DB_File (or the next generation and possibly immature BerkeleyDB) to get it in C.

If you go with the latter two options watch out for the need to set a sort order. You will run into that will the all-Perl solution as well, but there you can modify the module to work that way...

In reply to Re (tilly) 2: (corrections) Re: Answer: Efficient access to sparse lists? by tilly
in thread Efficient access to sparse lists? by Improv

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