Here something which would flatten your array completely; putting it into a "matrix" with 5 columns is left as an exercise.

Warning: Code not tested. 

# Call as: flatten([...])
sub flatten {
  my $aref=shift;
  die "not an array ref" unless ref($aref) eq 'ARRAY';
  @result=();
  foreach my $element (@$aref) {
    push @result,
        (ref($element) eq 'ARRAY' 
        ? flatten($element) 
        : $element);
  }
  @result;
}

[download]
-- 
Ronald Fischer <ynnor@mm.st>

In reply to Re: A maybe(?) interesting comp-sci type problem by rovf
in thread A maybe(?) interesting comp-sci type problem by Anonymous Monk

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