On Sat, 10 Feb 2001, Branden wrote:
> Suppose I have a string stored in $foo, say, "abcbca", and then I do:
>
> $bar = $foo;
> $foo .= "xyzyzx";
>
> I see two ways of doing this: one is allowing a string value to be shared by
> two or more variables, and the other one not.
Why would you want to share the string value? Why did you assign the
value of $foo to $bar if you really wanted to:
$bar = \$foo;
Or actually closer to what you seem to want:
*bar = \$foo;
Although a little birdy told me we're dropping globs for Perl6. Don't
most programmers do assignment for a reason? Why should we second-guess
them?
> Given mark-and-sweep or other advanced GC, which of them is better? Sharing
> the value or cloning on each assignment?
I don't believe implementing copy-on-write for scalars has anything to do
with garbage collection. Any garbage collector that will work for Perl
will need to work with references. All you're suggesting is a
beneath-the-covers reference, right?
What's the point? You seem to be engaging in some extreme and bizarre
form of premature optimization.
-sam
