Hello World, I have a obfuscating question, for whih I can found no answer.

I have to handle huge string arrays in a kind of database parsing. 
At the end, i have a code of the shape : 
let request_word s = ...
val request_word : string -> string array list

let associate v =
    let n = Array.length v in
    let v' = array.make n (request_word v.(0)) in
    for i = 1 to n-1 do
        v'.(i) <- (request_word v.(i));
    done;
    v'
;;

val associate : string array -> string array list array = <fun>

Yeah, it 's obfuscating, but I had no time to find another solution.And this is awfully slow... (In order to know, the computating time of each request separately is around 2 secs. I waited 5 minutes for a call of associate with a 3 elements vector.)

I would like to know if there is a way to do the same thing, without replacing a value in v' at each iteration. Would it really be better to switch the structure from an array to a temporary list, and after, copying the list into an array with Array.of_list.

Thanks 

Zed