in reply to What does arrow (->) refer to?

-> is the deference operator (see The Arrow Operator). It is used to resolve a value from a reference (a reference is like a pointer, see perlreftut). The lines like @entries = $mesg->entries; are using a blessed reference in an object oriented fashion to call an associated method. You can learn a bit about object oriented programming in Perl in perlboot. If any of this is unlcear, I'd be happy to answer any follow-ups.

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Re^2: What does arrow (->) refer to?
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 01, 2009 at 17:56 UTC
    Thanks for explaining me in the logical way. If possible, could you please explain it with an example. Just a brief one with any sample value.
[reply]
      There's a lot going on with even a simple example, so I'd really recommend reading perlboot and possibly perltoot, but the following is a basic object implementation:

      File: Foo.pm 

      package Foo;

use strict;
use warnings;

sub new {
  return bless {};
}

sub method {
    return "The value returned by method";
}

return 1;

      [download]

      and the script 

      #!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Foo;

my $object = Foo->new();
print $object->method();

      [download]
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