For what it's worth, in my opinion, your use of
ref here is perfectly valid and makes your function very flexible and easy to use, for the uses you have for it.
I remember something in a project I was involved in in the distant past that made use of data structures a little like this:
$struct = {
key => {
sub_key => 'value',
sub_key2 => 'value2',
},
key2 => 'other_value',
};
Or maybe it was:
@items = (
'item1',
[ 'nested1', 'nested2', 'nested3' ],
[ 'nested4',
[ 'nested5', 'nested5a' ] ],
'item6',
'item7',
[ 'nested8', 'nested9' ],
);
I don't fully remember the rationale for building a data structure like that, but I think it had something to do with decision-making, where if you'd come across a reference, only one of the references would be used, with control passing off to the next item when it was completed (something like that). I just remember that it required us to use 'ref' when processing it, and perhaps a bit of recursion. I'm perfectly willing to accept that this is bad practice, and I've learned a lot of Perl between then and now and it's likely that I might have come up with alternative way to accomplish what we were doing... *shrug*.
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.