> The array emulation is another one of those things I've read about a few times and never really understood well enough to be safe around :-) .

I think it helps to know that Perl4 had no references˛, so none of the - now normal - nested data-structures described in perldsc were available.

With the introduction of Perl5 multi-dim hashes had to be kept for backwards compatibility, but are for most an unknown or obscure feature.

But they are quite handy sometimes, you'd be surprised how many people tend to reinvent something like $h{ join(",",@dims) }= "x" which is essentially the same without a safer separator.°

HTH! :)

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

°) a former boss was particularly proud to show me his "genius" trick to safe memory ...

˛) a lot had to be achieved with *type-globs (yuck)

In reply to Re^3: Peculiar hash behavior by LanX
in thread Peculiar hash behavior by dd-b

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