WOW . . .

That was even a better answer than I expected!

For the interactive application I've written/using, pre-allocating the hashes, has improvements of 8-24% using hashes with 256 to 2048 keys on AIX and even better on Linux. But I didn't know about how the algorithm worked on smaller hashes. With your great and simple script, I can test larger combinations as well.

Thank you very much...Ed

PS: Is the algorithm the same on perl 5.8.8?