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in reply to Re: Perl Number range lookup question
in thread Perl Number range lookup question

I'd definitely benchmark this vs. calculating the tier on the fly each time (i.e., in this case, run it against print int( ( $x % 50 ) / 10 );). Especially with a simple tier calculation, I would expect the hash lookup to take longer than (re)calculating on demand.

Using the precalculated hash would also be slower if the number of lookups isn't substantially larger than the number of precalculated values. If fewer lookups would be done, but the calculation is slower than a hash lookup, the better option would be to do no precalculation and instead do your lookups with

my $tier = $tiers{$n} //= calculate_tier($n);
which will calculate the tier for a value the first time it's requested, then return the calculated value from the hash on subsequent requests for that value. (Note that you'll need to use ||= instead of //= if your perl is older than 5.10.)

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Re^3: Perl Number range lookup question
by tobyink (Canon) on Jun 18, 2012 at 17:34 UTC

    my $tier = $tiers{$n} //= calculate_tier($n);

    That's a rather elegant memoization technique for functions in general (provided the function parameters can't be references). If your function took two parameters, you could even do:

    my $tier = $tiers{$n, $m} //= calculate_tier($n, $m);

    ... taking advantage of Perl's rarely used multi-dimensional array fakery.

    perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'