Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister | |
PerlMonks |
Re: reference questionby arturo (Vicar) |
on Aug 14, 2001 at 19:40 UTC ( [id://104812]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
First, you need to know that neither of these has anything *directly* to do with references. I recommend the documentation on shift to you; one thing to keep in mind here is that, inside a subroutine, the *default argument* to shift is @_ (outside, it's @ARGV which holds the arguments passed to the script), so that shift is really shift @_. The first line you give returns the first member of @_, making @_ one element shorter (as per the documentation for shift); the second will set $myarray to the *number* of entries in the @_ array (because you're evaluating it in a scalar context). The first is appropriate if you want to get a single argument from @_. The second is useful if you know you need a certain number of arguments, and want to print an error message if there aren't enough. An importantly different syntax is my ($myarray) = @_; (note parens), which evaluates @_ in *list context* and will return the first element of @_ (without removing it from @_, like shift does). (if you got the impression that this context business is rather important stuff, you got the right impression =) HTH!
In Section
Seekers of Perl Wisdom
|
|