>>Any pointers to reading lucid descriptions of dealing
>>with variable variables in perl would be greatly appreciated.

>In short, you don't.

why not? Because it is bad? Because it is bad style? Because it will lead to unexpected results? I don't mean to be argumentative, but just telling me I shouldn't is not satifying.

>Why is it that so many people want to
>use symbolic references in Perl (because that's what it is)?
>You don't have symbolic references in C. You don't have
>symbolic references in Java. You don't have symbolic
>references in many, many languages. And I don't get the
>impression people programming in Java or C regulary ask
>how to get the name of a variable, or how to use a value
>as a variable.

I know nothing about C and Java so I have no idea what those users do. However, I can think of various uses for such a facility. Suppose I have a choice of actions I can pick from

$action can be 'dothis' or 'dothat' or 'dosomethingelse'

And I want to run the functions dothis() or dothat() or dosomething() based on the action picked. I can use the following code --

&dothis if ($action eq 'dothis');
&dothat if ($action eq 'dothat');
&dosomethingelse if ($action eq 'dosomethingelse');
[download]

or I could just

&$action;
[download]

but I can't because that is not allowed under use strict; so I

eval($action);
[download]

and that works and is a lot shorter than the series of if statements. Imagine if I had a lot of choices for action -- that would be a lot of if statements.

Well, this is just one example.

>>what if the var was a var?
>What else could a var be than a var

Sorry, my bad. I meant, what if the var name was varying and I wanted to do something based on its name.

Anyway, thanks for the advice. I'll think of better ways to write my code.