I finally had my first Perl epiphany the other week.

Someone had posted to a newsgroup about how to extract arrays from a hash. Not being a programmer by trade, but more by happenstance, I still feel sorry for those among us (like myself) who are not gurus. Anyway, I thought I'd take a crack at explaining it, since I was curious myself. I made myself a little hash of arrays of arrays, and pondering it meditatively, I thought to myself: if only scalars are stored in the symbol table, why can't I just use the scalar name of the first array in the first array to get at the values of that array (what a mouthful!).

It all seemed too easy, so I quickly finished up the script to test whether 

@extract = @{$hoa{'arrays'}[0]}

[download]
would grab the values I wanted. I was so amazed I had to look it up in the camel book just to make sure I hadn't made a discovery that would rock the Perl community to its foundations (okay, just to make sure I was right).

Anyway, that was the point at which referencing and dereferencing values suddenly made a whole lot more sense to me.

So beware Perl gurus, wherever you are; I'm on my way to the top!

matt

In reply to Things that make you go hmmm by mattg

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