Generating an array of n identical elements

[bronto]

You are an old Matlab(TM) user, aren't you? Now your boss asked you to learn perl and you really miss the dear old ones function. You were used to create n-lenght arrays -er... vectors!- of identical elements by simply doing

fives = 5*ones(1:20) ;

and now in perl you don't find any ones.

Stop crying and use map!

# An array of twenty fives:
my @fives = map 5,(1..20) ;

# An array of 3 Xes
# (You must be at least 18 to watch this!)
my @porn = map 'X',(1..3) ;

my @whatever = replicate($x,$n) ;

sub replicate {
  my ($x,$n) = @_ ;

  return () if $n < 1 ;

  return map $x,(1..$n) ;
}