I'm trying to get a grasp on references and I was under the impression that you could not pass hashes & arrays to a subroutine. I thought you needed to pass references to a subroutine and then dereference it once you were inside the sub.

To test this, I created this piece of code and my 'clear as mud' understanding of references became much more difficult to see through when my @array & %hash actually printed their values.

Can someone explain to me how I managed to do something I thought was not possible?

#! perl -w
use strict;

my @array = ("0","1","2","3");
my %hash = ("zero" => "0", "one" => "1", "two" => "2", "three" => "3")
+;
my $aref = \@array;
my $href = \%hash;

&test($aref, $href);

sub test {
    my $one = shift;
    my $two = shift;    
    print join (' ', @$one),"\n";
    print join (' ', %$two),"\n";
    print join (' ', @$aref),"\n";
    print join (' ', %$href),"\n";
    print join (' ', @array),"\n";
    print join (' ', %hash),"\n";
    sleep 1;
}
[download]

Thanks.

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