o Another solution: Memoize date-to-number conversion function:

August 1999

Perl Hardware Store

Slide #32

Another solution: Memoize date-to-number conversion function:

         use Memoize;

         sub compare_dates {
           to_number($a) <=> to_number($b);
         }

         # Convert "Apr 2, 1969" to "196990402"
         sub to_number {
           my ($m, $d, $y) = 
             ($_[0] =~ /(\w{3}) (\d+), (\d+)/);

           sprintf("%04d%02d%02d", 
                   $y, $m2n{$m}, $d);
         }

         memoize 'to_number';

Only 1,000 splits now, a big improvement