Personally I concur with both Abigail-II and jeffa. They have already talked about what they think is not quite right, and I'll add a bit more.

Not only do we lose yummy hash goodness, but everytime we go to add data via this methodology, or remove data we are copying the entire array contents, allocate more memory, etc.... Granted on smaller data sets this might be trivial, but when the data sets get larger, and the hash structure gets sparser, this will lead to serious performance degredation.

I have had issues with some of Abigail-II's comments in the past as well, but 9 times out of 10 they are spot on technically, and it's just my ego getting in the way of me learning something new. I think that the whole point of the comments here were really just an attempt to show you that this particular wheel, isn't really a wheel and attempting to reinvent it may lead you to BadPlaces(TM). I would personally be interested to hear/read why you needed this abstraction.

No offense against your skill level coding, but this smacks of a learning process, looking back over my own personal experience. It feels like you may be making this abstraction to get around some other issue. More of a band-aid as opposed to a diagnosis and treatment. What can you use this as a base for that you couldn't with a normal hash or hash ref? Why a hash instead of an array, with elements you need being assigned numerical values? What problem space are you addressing?

One last thing. Personally I feel like you turned around and did to Abigail-II exactly what you claimed (he/she?) did to you. Personally I think the right thing to do would be to apologize to (him/her?), even if it isn't public as your comments came across as off the cuff, scathing, and down right immature..

Note: I'm simply asking you to look at the mirror, not attempting to start a flame war.

MMMMM... Chocolaty Perl Goodness.....

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.