Where you would think "struct" in Cish languages think Hash in Perl. Where you would think "pointer to array" (to get an array of arbitrary size) in C, think Array in Perl.

Perl hashes are associative arrays where a scalar value is accessed using a string. A scalar value can be a reference to something else (like an array, a hash, a subroutine, ...) so you can build nested data structures in whatever way suits the problem at hand.

Perl arrays are dynamically sized so you can grow and shrink them as suits your application. In fact you can edit them (insert or delete blocks of elements) in pretty much any way you like and not worry about complicated book keeping or large computation costs.

In Perl an instance of your struct and its use would look something like:

use strict;
use warnings;

my %struct = (data => 1, pointers => []);

print "Data is $struct{data}.\n";
print "There are ", scalar @{$struct{pointers}}, " pointers allocated.
+\n";
push @{$struct{pointers}}, "hello world", "the end is neigh", "this is
+ the end";
print "$_\n" for @{$struct{pointers}};
print "There are ", scalar @{$struct{pointers}}, " pointers allocated.
+\n";

[download]

which prints:

Data is 1.
There are 0 pointers allocated.
hello world
the end is neigh
this is the end
There are 3 pointers allocated.

[download]
True laziness is hard work

In reply to Re: How do I create a C-like struct with dynamic fields in Perl? by GrandFather
in thread How do I create a C-like struct with dynamic fields in Perl? by man-et-arms

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