Thank you for this tutorial. You've helped clear up one thing that has probably caused me some confusion when reading others' Perl code, which is that the curly braces have two different purposes. One is to dereference arrays and hashes. For example:

my @myarray = @{ $aref } ;
my %myhash  = %{ $href } ;

[download]

The other use is to reference a hash value by means of its key:

my $hash_value = $myhash{ $keyA } ;

[download]

But is there some consistent logic to this? That is, does the internal Perl logic consider a key of a hash to essentially be a reference to the storage holding its associated value?

And are there any other "gotchas" in Perl that typically cause confusion in newbies?

Thanks!

In reply to Re: Tutorial RFC: Guide to Perl references, Part 1 by djrosenblatt
in thread Tutorial RFC: Guide to Perl references, Part 1 by stevieb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.