>
> Depending on who wrote the code, they may have extracted the rows
> as hashrefs rather than arrays; that can be a 10x slowdown right
> there. [I have no idea why so many people are so addicted to storing
> rows in hashes, but it is always a significant slowdown; and
> array slices are no more complicated than hash slices!]
I have not done perl code for a while now, but most perl coders, already
suffering from a complex of coding in an unreadable language do not
prefer to make it worse by using array which is position dependent
and hence reading it can be a nightmare when large number of cols are
selected.
Also isn't array_ref even better than array, since it avoids copying the data
to your local array in the code.