Yes, I came to the same conclusion. In my case, I will be able to use SSH with compression and this indeed solves all my pains; somehow it wasn't the first choice for me. I was dumbstruck probably, as it seems obvious in hindsight.

For consistency sake though, I'd like to mention that conversion from text to number does indeed add compactness to serialized data. Consider this:

use Storable qw(freeze);

my @a = '0001'..'1000';
my $foo = freeze \@a;
$_ += 0 for @a;
my $bar = freeze \@a;
print "before: ", length $foo, ", after: ", length $bar, "\n";

before: 6016, after: 4635
[download]

I fail to understand why so many people are insistent on ignoring the obvious. Granted, today's fast and abundant hardware resources may have spoiled us but there are situations yet when every byte counts. Make the dataset in above example three orders of magnitude larger and the difference becomes quite distinct.

Regarding array iteration, I feel this discussion was beneficial for me as it cleared some murky points. I wish all my questions were answered so productively in future. :)

Regards,
Alex.