This is my first experience with subroutines ever, and I'm straight up confused.

Ok, so you were sick the day they covered subroutines, I'll try to clear them up a bit. You were given a subroutine with some commonly used shortcuts. Here's a different example broken down into four versions that do exactly the same thing. 

# calling the subroutine. in this example the
# first arg is a variable, second is a literal value
my $arg1 = 100;
my $return_value = add_these($arg1, 200);

print $return_value;

# subroutines receive arguments via an array named @_
# this version gets the args by array index
sub add_these{
    my $first = $_[0];
    my $second = $_[1];
    my $answer = $first + $second;
    return $answer; 
}

# this one shifts values off the front of the array 
# note that @_ is implied if an array is not given as 
# the argument to shift. commonly seen as:
# my $value = shift; 
sub add_these{
    my $first = shift @_;
    my $second = shift @_;
    my $answer = $first + $second;
    return $answer; 
}

# as shown here it is not necessary to assign the 
# arguments to an intermediate variable - you can
# use them directly (however the extra variables
# often makes the code more readable)
sub add_these{
    my $answer = $_[0] + $_[1];
    return $answer; 
}

# you don't even need to return a variable, you can 
# directly return the value calculated by an expression,
# as shown here and in the "hint" example you were given
sub add_these{
    return  $_[0] + $_[1];  
}

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As for the multiples problem, you're looking for a boolean (true/false) value, represented as true = 1, false = 0. So your subroutine would determine if the arguments were multiples and return 1 if they are, 0 if they're not. And yes, use an if statement, (and the modulo operator as others suggested). There are other ways to do it, but no sense getting fancy till you have a handle on the basics.

In reply to Re: finding multiples of two values by hangon
in thread finding multiples of two values by urnumdei

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