sauoq's reply provided the best way of dealing with this type of problems. One of my old post provided exactly the same solution to a similar question with a different face. You may want to check it out.

However dug's post is definitely unique, although it is not "good", (I know he knew this ;-).

Let's go deeper with the concept he brought up: symbolic reference.

There are two types of reference in Perl:
  1. hard reference, the everyday used reference created by using \. Recommended.
  2. symbolic reference. The reference created by "name". Not recommended. Banned by using
    use strict("refs"); or simply use strict;
However it is worth to understand, although not worth to use. I wrote two pieces of simple code to demo:
  1. Symbolic reference of scalar:
    $a = 666; $b = 888; $name = "a"; print $$name, "\n"; $name = "b"; print $$name, "\n";
  2. Symbolic reference of sub:
    $name = "a"; &$name; $name = "b"; &$name; sub a { print "in sub a\n"; } sub b { print "in sub b\n"; }

In reply to Re: Naming Subs by pg
in thread Naming Subs by eoin

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.