in reply to Re: passing array as an argument
in thread passing array as an argument

Another thing is that, for performance reason, even there is only one parameter, it is still a good idea to pass array ref, instead of array.

(davido didn't mention this simply because this was not asked in the original post)

my @numb = (1..100);
print sum(\@numb);

sub sum {
    my $numb = shift;
    my $total;
    foreach (@$numb) {$total += $_};
    return $total;
}

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Re: Re: Re: passing array as an argument
by sauoq (Abbot) on Oct 31, 2003 at 00:48 UTC
    Another thing is that, for performance reason, even there is only one parameter, it is still a good idea to pass array ref, instead of array.

    Well, that's not strictly true. Perl passes by reference by default. Consider: 

    perl -le 'sub scare { $_[0] = "boo!" } my $me; scare($me); print $me'

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    Often people subvert this by copying the parameters themselves. Code like this is more common than not: 
    sub foo {
    my @args = @_;
    # ... do stuff ...  
}

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    And usually, it's fine because argument lists aren't very big.

    As for passing a single large array, though, there isn't much reason to pass a reference other than to be able to name it something nice in the sub rather than work directly with @_.

    -sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";
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