in reply to Re^2: fasta hash
in thread fasta hash

As moritz said, 1 (or ++) is a common choice of value, but it's not necessarily the best one. It doesn't usually matter these days for 100k elements, but it's better (thanks, Liz! ;) for memory size to do something like this:

my ($undef); while (whatever...) { .... $hash{$key} = $undef; }

This way each element points to the same $undef value. Otherwise, each element would point to a different copy of the value 1. That's a kind of "poor man's aliasing". For bonus points, you might look at Array::RefElem or Data::Alias.