Lose the ingrained attitude.

The advice about symbolic refs applies to people who are using them to store an unknown amount of arbitrary data and who don't realize that they may accidentally create clashes between different parts of their code, and that they might wipe out something important.

You're using them for meta-programming, which is exactly what they are good for.

Incidental question. Why are you returning the string 'SUCCESS' rather than just using true/false normally? (Using true/false would seem like less code, should run faster, and reduces opportunities for typing something like 'SUCCSES' to make for a runtime logic error that might not be easy to spot.)

In reply to Re: Need help with a conceptual speed bump by tilly
in thread Need help with a conceptual speed bump by mstone

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.