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Odud (1047)

Odud
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Journal of Odud (1047)

Wednesday June 04, 2003
11:00 AM

References hurt my brain

[ #12616 ]

Why do references always trip me up? I tend not to use them greatly and always struggle when I do. Context: I was trying to make a subroutine return a reference to a slice of an array. I wrote
 
  \@array[0..3]
 
which just returned a reference to a scalar before finding what I needed was
 
  [@array[0..3]]


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  • same problem (Score:2, Informative)

    by spur (4197)
    I struggled with the same thing today. Then I looked it up in the Cookbook, and it said:

    "An array slice is exactly the same as a list of individual array elements. Because you can't take a reference to a list, you can't take a reference to an array slice".

    • I knew the answer would be there - I just didn't have it with me at work today. It's one of those things where it looks so right (but just doesn't work the way you expect).
    • Now if you want some serious brain hurting, try this :

      perl -le '$x="abcdef";$y=\substr $x,2,2;$$y="gh";print $x'

      (warning ! this behaviour is not documented ! use at your own risk !)

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