Re^4: the if statement

[blazar]

I love your answer. Below I have put my result of running your benchmark in a Fedora9 VM on a Lenovo laptop.

I personally believe this just shows that the benchmark itself is not significative, or that it is significative in showing that there's no significative difference between the two "techniques" and thus also as a reminder not to even bother in the future: just do so when you have actually different algorithms to start with...

You may find much more interesting benchmarks in another recent thread...

But what really intrigues me is how you built the test hash and keys to test with... 2 'map's in 2 lines of code. Figuring out 'genkeys' and the %hash, and @test values will take me the rest of the afternoon; thanks

What's so difficult to understand? I hope I can help you to clarify: %hash and %test are a plain regular hash and array respectively. Since they're lexical variables, the subs used in the benchmark will be closures around them.

genkeys() takes a whole number $n and returns that many random strings, of length comprised in an hardcoded manner between 5 and 14. Since genkeys() makes no attempt at removing duplicate entries from its return list, %hash is a hash with at most 5000 keys, but it may have less. @test has all these keys, plus other 5000, and it may have duplicates. I wanted a test array of "input" values such that about half of them values will succeed and about a half will fail.

Coming to genkeys(), analyze it top-down; it's simply of the form

    sub genkeys {
        map { CODE } 1..shift;
    }

with CODE being:

            join '' => map $chr[rand @chr], (1) x (5 + rand 10);

The former takes a list of the length of the supplied argument and to each element of it will apply CODE. Since $_ is not actually used in CODE, the actual values of the elements don't matter, only the length of the list, and it may well have been e.g. (1) x shift. In the latter, similarly, I build a list of arbritrary thingies of length between 5 and 14. Then map makes that into a list of length between 5 and 14 of random characters taken from the @chr array and join... err... well, joins them into a string of that length. As you can see, it's not that esoteric after all...