alright, so I friggin converted the parser to a hash and an array version, and ran the same benchmark. the results are:
array: 760 lines per second hash : 642 lines per second 120 lps improvement from 640 lps. which is an 18% improvement. think I'm gonna have to stay with arrays. side note: 400 thousand method calls totals to about 0.7 seconds of overhead. -- Greg London x7541
