in reply to resetting a foreach loop!

Change average() to use its parameters, not the top-level @array directly; then you can limit @array to the appropriate context:

sub average {
    if (@_) {
        my @temp = @_;
        my $sum = 0;
        foreach (@temp) {
            $sum = $sum + $_;
        }
        return $sum/@temp;
    }
}

[download]

edit: fixed indenting for readability

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: resetting a foreach loop!
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Nov 17, 2017 at 19:16 UTC

    Your average specifically checks if no arguments are provided, but doesn't actually handle that situation. Fixed: 

    sub average {
    if (@_) {
        my $sum;
        for (@_) {
            $sum += $_;
        }
        return $sum/@_;
    } else {
        return undef;
    }
}

    [download]

    Same, but shorter: 

    sub sum { my $sum; $sum += $_ for @_; $sum }
sub avg { @_ ? sum(@_)/@_ : undef }

    [download]
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[select]

      ++Indeed. Technically, the no-explicit-return version of the function returns 0 for an empty argument list, so it implictly handles the empty case. (I infer that the OP did the if(@_) just to prevent divide-by-zero.) But I agree that explicit undef is a better return value than relying on a default 0.

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        Technically, the no-explicit-return version of the function returns 0 for an empty argument list

        I am aware of that, but they are relying undefined behaviour to do so[1], and it's a poor value to return.

        I infer that the OP did the if(@_) just to prevent divide-by-zero.

        That would actually have been a far better outcome!

        1. "If no return is found and if the last statement is an expression, its value is returned. If the last statement is a loop control structure like a foreach or a while , the returned value is unspecified. The empty sub returns the empty list."
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Re^2: resetting a foreach loop!
by lunette (Acolyte) on Nov 16, 2017 at 22:24 UTC
    that fixed everything, thank you so much!!
[reply]
      Sorting the same array twice and assigning the results to two new arrays, potentially very long, is a bit wasteful when all you want is to find the smallest and largest value in the array. You could for instance do something like this:

       my($largest, $smallest) = (sort { $b <=> $a } @array)[0,-1];

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