FYI: Here's an interesting discussion of benchmarking methods of swapping variables.

You are right that you use a mask or other methods to avoid creating temporary variables. However, those are tricks that are generally used by people coding in lower level languages. I don't think they are "natural" to someone coding in Cobol or BASIC. Good point about "Programming Perl" not being quite accurate, though.

Cheers,
Ovid

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