[Wellington-pm] Data::Distinct

[Peter C. Kelly]

Hello

Firstly, I miss Catalyst and a functioning Perl-Mongers group terribly
now I've moved to Perth, and frankly wish I could have my sunshine and
companions simultaneously.

Today I found myself wanting to squeeze down a data structure (a set of
offer curves) into just the unique ones.  The offer curves themselves
are a fairly complex data structure.

The way that I did this was not to use Data::Compare (no good reason
why) but instead to create a hash where the key was the curve
(serialised using Data::Dumper), and the values were an array of the
original hash keys to get them.

Do you think there would be any utility in a Data::Distinct module that
looked for duplicates at a certain level (or levels) into a data
structure and provided a distinct version?

Or would it be better to just compare them all to each other using
Data::Compare?  Is it reasonable to think that it would be more
efficient to use a hash, or would the /eval/ing to get them out again
outweigh the exponential nature of one-to-one comparisons?

Cheers,

Peter