Old habits dye hard, or at least dark grey.

Coming from a 'C'/C++ background, I hate to constantly access an array element in a loop using the array subscripting. I prefer a pointer to the entry after computing subscripts once.

With a hash, is it better to take a reference to the the keyed scalar, or repeatedly recompute the hash?

A snippit of a 60 line loop

      ELEMENT:
        foreach $key (keys %Contracts) 
        {
           $tot_count++;
           {# lock block
              lock @{$Contracts{$key}};
              next ELEMENT if ($Contracts{$key}[STATE] eq $ST_VOID); 
              next ELEMENT if ($Contracts{$key}[STATE] eq $ST_REPORTED
+); 
              $elapsed_time = time() - $Contracts{$key}[START];
              .... lots more accesses to the  $Contracts{$key} record.
[download]

Does 'locality or reference' optimized that hash access, or is the key rehashed on every use in the loop?

?Better?

     ELEMENT:
        foreach $key (keys %Contracts) 
        {
          $tot_count++;
          {# lock block
              lock @{$Contracts{$key}};
              $Cntrct_ref = \$Contracts{$key};
              next ELEMENT if ($Cntrct_ref[STATE] eq $ST_VOID); 
              next ELEMENT if ($Cntrct_ref[STATE] eq $ST_REPORTED); 
              $elapsed_time = time() - $Cntrct_ref[START];

              ...
[download]

Wisdom is needed, please

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