I was reading in Effective Perl Programming about creating hash references such as this:

$student = {}; 
$student->{last} = 'Smith';
[download]

I believe he is saying that this is more efficient to be passed to a subroutine, and I agree with that.
What puzzles me though is that you can, and should, always pass a reference to a hash, or array, to a subroutine anyway:

&sub(\%hash, \@array);
[download]

I have also heard that it is faster to create and use a hash reference in general than using a "regular" hash such as:

my %student = {};
$student{'last'} = 'Smith';
[download]

This might be a silly question but is it more efficient to declare and uses hashes that way (reference) and if it is more efficient then why do we have the possibility to declare and use them the "regular" way?
Is it one of those TIMTOWTDI things?

Confused Monk

---

---

• 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.