Re^2: pointer/alias question

Got it. Simple. That'll save me quite a few lines. That's the solution for me.

I'm sure I tried something similar, but without the ||{} it was getting an undef reference, which obviously doesn't work.

Anonymous Monk suggests that my use of local was killing my pointer idea it seems.

Out of curiosity, since I looked all over the Perl docs perlsyn, perlvar, etc. Where is the *pointer-thing documented?

Cheers!

Comment on Re^2: pointer/alias question

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Re^3: pointer/alias question by GrandFather (Saint) on Dec 03, 2010 at 02:53 UTC
toolic gave the link, but the confusion is that it isn't a "pointer thing", it's a "type glob thing". Perl doesn't have pointers. It has references, but that's not the same thing - really, it's not the same thing! Perl uses reference counted memory management and that just doesn't work well with pointers. It does work well with generally not having to worry about how memory is handled though. True laziness is hard work	[reply]
Re^4: pointer/alias question by shoness (Friar) on Dec 03, 2010 at 20:33 UTC
Thanks again toolic and grandfather. Now that I know what to call it, I see only 28 PerlMonks nodes in more than 10 years that discuss them. The docs toolic point to say typeglobs "used to be the preferred way to pass arrays and hashes by reference into a function, but now that we have real references, this is seldom needed". Done and done. Ovid explains typeglobs well here: Re: Confused about typeglobs and references.	[reply]
Re^3: pointer/alias question by toolic (Bishop) on Dec 03, 2010 at 01:52 UTC
Where is the pointer-thing documented?* Typeglobs and Filehandles	[reply]