It sounds like you are trying to produce a linked list in Perl. For most purposes linked lists are not necessary because native arrays are efficient enough. However inserting in the middle is still O(n). So if you need more complex data structures then you might want to take a look at how Dominus implemented BTrees in Perl.

For production code I would just use a real database or else use DB_File to tie a hash to an efficient BTree implementation...

In reply to Re (tilly) 1: Dynamically Linked List by tilly
in thread Dynamically Linked List by Carl the Rake

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