in reply to Re: Listen to Tilly ... he knows what's what!
in thread References

Now, you've piqued my curiousity. Why on earth would you want to filter out the most powerful syntax tool in Perl since the subroutine?!? References are the sole thing that took Perl from a glorified scripting language to a programming language that rivals the expressibility of almost every other C-like language out there!

In addition, references are not a very complicated concept. Try explaining how C does strings to something, one day. Or, try explaining the friends concept in C++. All of a sudden, references become reeaaaalllly simple.

------
/me wants to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier!

Vote paco for President!

  • Comment on Re: Re: Listen to Tilly ... he knows what's what!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Re: Listen to Tilly ... he knows what's what!
by Cine (Friar) on Aug 20, 2001 at 18:19 UTC
    It can be that both you and I believe that references are very easy to understand, but try to take a java programmer with little XP and teach him the concept of references. This was what I wanted to avoid, but if I have to explain sym tables instead, I will go a long way to explain refs first ;)

    T I M T O W T D I
[reply]
      Every Java programmer knows references, even if they don't know it. It's an integral part of Java. Every time you use an object, you are using a reference. The difference is a syntax difference. Java uses '.' and Perl uses '->' ... Ok. Just say that '->' is '.' and you are 75% of the way there.

      ------
      /me wants to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier!

      Vote paco for President!

[reply]
        I know, but as in Perl you dont actually have to KNOW about them... ;) I waited several weeks in my perl programming to even look at references.
        However when using the construct \%c it becomes a necessety to know it...

        T I M T O W T D I
[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom