Re: Re: Data structure challenge

[gjb]

Wouldn't a pack(a[U*log_10(U)], 'z') do the trick?

Thanks Aristotle, I was too lazy/huried to check the correct syntax. The length of the string we want to allocate is N = U*ceil(log_10(U)), so I hoped pack(aN, '') would create a string of N '\0' characters using some low level memory allocation function. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to happen, the resulting string consists of N spaces, so there goes constant time... :(

Just my 2 cents, -gjb-

[Aristotle]

That isn't valid Perl. What exactly were you thinking of?

I too though that if there's any way to achieve this, pack will be it, but there doesn't seem to be any pack format that would leave any part of the result string uninitialized.