On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 03:33:30PM -0800, John W. Krahn wrote: > Paul Kraus wrote: > > > > Ok a couple questions on Ref from pg 251 programming Perl. > > > > push @$arrrayref,$filename); > > $$arrayref[0]="January"; > > @$arrayref[4..6]=qw/May June July/; > > > > So this is actually creating an anonymous array that it then references > > correct? > > so the assignments January ect are being made to an anonymous array. > > No, an anonymous array is delimited by [ and ]. That is creating an > actual array that is only accessible through an array reference. > > my $ref = [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ]; > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > anonymous array
Not worth picking a fight over, to be sure, but I don't see the difference. Assuming $arrayref didn't exist before, then after each of those three examples it will, and it will be a reference to an array with no name. Seems to me that Paul got it spot on. > > I have seen them used to simulate a multidimensional array as well has > > hash and that makes sense. But beyond that I am kind of at a loss. > > If you are used to data structures in other languages then you may find > Perl's data structures pretty limited (I know I did :-).) However > Perl's other features more then make up for this. I'm not quite sure what to make of that either. Which languages and data structures are you comparing against? In a language like C, you have to build everything yourself. In C++ you might use the STL, but I think you'd have to compare that against CPAN to be fair. It is, of course, quite possible to build ADTs in Perl - it just seems to be less necessary, as you note. -- Paul Johnson - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pjcj.net -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
