Our December meeting falls on Perl's 20th birthday. And Perl Seminar
NY started in December 2000, so in our 8th season we're celebrating
our 7th birthday! So chances are good that after Steve's talk
(below), celebration will occur!

Perl Seminar NY
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
6:15-8:15 pm
NYPC User Group office suite
481 8th Ave, Suite 550
(between West 34 & 35 Sts, Manhattan)

Steve Lembark, "Developing a Fast Linked List in Perl: Why and How"

Abstract:
Perl will iterate a single array quickly using
the 'foreach (@array)' loop. This works for a large number of
cases, but does not handle the case of comparing
two lists to one another: the for loop only gives
you one loop 'for free'. This leaves $otherloop[$i]
as the main alternative for non-destructively
examining the other loop.

Problems start when both lists are long. Things start to bog down on
computing the offset of
entries in a 100K list.

Linked list classes in Perl are up there with
java compilers in rarity. The only linked list
class around uses doubly-linked lists, which
are flexable but bulky and slow.

There are two ways to handle this: inline code
or an object. The inline code is reasonably
fast, the object is a bit tricky to implement
however. Object:: LinkedList implements an object for handling linked
lists. That's what we'll talk about on December 18.