You don't, because doing so would violate the guarantee that you cannot buffer overflow in Perl. But, there are good reasons why C gives you the rope to buffer overflow.

Let's say you want to iterate through the characters of a string and do something with each character. In C, that's pretty simple. Strings are just arrays of characters and arrays are just fancy pointers. 

char string[] = "Hello";
char *ptr;
fr ( ptr = string; *ptr; ptr++ ) {
    do_something_with( *ptr ); // This is a single char
}

[download]
Now, let's say you want to do the same thing in Perl. There's a few ways, but none are anywhere as efficient. 
foreach my $char ( split //, $string ) { ... }
while ( $string =~ /(.)/g ) { my $char = $1; ... }
for ( my $i = 0; $i <= length $string; $i++ ) { my $char = substr( $st
+ring, $index, 1 ); ... }

[download]

My wife's blog

In reply to Re^3: The Concept of References by dragonchild
in thread The Concept of References by leriksen

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