Wow, looks good. I'm gonna experiment with it as soon as I get a chance. Thanks a lot.

:-) I wrote that short module just to show that multi-dimensional arrays can be done a la C, if you have nothing better to do. The only advantage is size - array elements occupy exactly four bytes (x86) which are packed into a pre-allocated string. There's no overhead introduced by individual elements or rows.

Of course Perl has a native array type. Multi-dimensional arrays are not a fundamental type but they're easily constructed with references. See perldata, perldsc.

The following code has serious side effects. Don't blindly cut and paste into your program (unless you like trouble).

#!/usr/bin/perl

my @ary = map {["${_}1", "${_}2", "${_}3"]} 'a'..'u';

$\ = "\n"; $" = $, = ",";

split ($,), print map {$ary[$_[$_]][$_]} 0..$#_
    for glob join $,, map {"{@{[0..20]}}"} 1..3;
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