I was recently tasked with 'porting' a large body of code from Perl 5.6 to 5.8.x. The following construct (simplified), which was legal in 5.6 is no longer so: 

my %$h = ('name' => 'value', ...);
...
print $h->{'name'};

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I suspect the original author of the sin of cut-and-paste and not understanding references, and hash ref initializers. I changed the code to: 
my %h = ('name' => 'value', ...);
...
print $h{'name'};

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and all is well now. But when explaining this to the group, I couldn't answer the question of whether my change was any better than: 
my $h = {'name' => 'value', ...};
...
print $h->{'name'};

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So my question is whether anyone has a good reason to choose one over the other? My assumption is that there is no difference.



pbeckingham - typist, perishable vertebrate.

In reply to Relative Merits of References by pbeckingham

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