Well, I guess I had that in me from years spent coding C/C++, but alwasy pass references to data instead of replicating it. Undoubtfully this is a rather trivial skill to grasp and anyone who'd spent at least 6 month coding would *I hope* know that.

Perl is actually quite good when it comes to references. Certainly much easier to handle than C pointers for example. Take a look at this snippet: 
my ($a, $b, $c) = qw/asdf foo bar/;

s/d/D/g for ($a, $b, $c);

print "$a;$b;$c\n";

[download]
Perl is farily well optimized and in this for loop no memory gets duplicated. Instead, the s/// operator works on data stored in the original place (allocated for the a,b,c variables).

There are numerous other examples one could bring up. Not the least is the ease with which you can pass references around in perl. In fact, I believe this is one of the first basic things that any novice Perl book would mention to its reader. For those who don't have a book however, I suggest refering to this excellent 'article' on Perl references here (written by fair brother dominus.

_____________________ 
# Under Construction

[download]

In reply to Re: Learning to *really* love references by vladb
in thread Learning to *really* love references by astaines

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.