I am in a learning stage learning about references. I think I have an old fashioned way of doing things and I have a feeling that this example code is good candidate for ''upgrading'' to a more efficient way of hitting the objective. To me, references are new and therefore I feel this could be good learning excercise for those of us that just don't quite understand references, how they work, and what their purpose is.

Merlin helped me some with a paper he wrote for Linux Magazine. However, conceptualization is different from excersization. (:

The objective of this code is to get the number of elements in @var from within multiple sub routines. Is this code optimized or should the use of references make it work more optimally?

The purpose behind this type of example is to keep from repeating lines (in each subroutine) to tell me what the number of elements are in @var. This is why I use subroutines so that I don't have to repeat the same code over and over again. 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;

&sub1;
&sub2;

sub sub1 {
    my @var;
    my $num;
    my $numElements;

    for $num (0..2) {
       $var[$num] = "blah";
    }
    
    $numElements = @var;
    print "Number of elements in \@var of ".(caller(0))[3]." is $numEl
+ements\n";
    print &eval_array_size(@var),"\n";
}

sub sub2 {
    my @var;
    my $num;
    my $numElements;

    for $num (0..5) {
       $var[$num] = "blah";
    }

    $numElements = @var;
    print "Number of elements in \@var of ".(caller(0))[3]." is $numEl
+ements\n";
    print &eval_array_size(@var),"\n";
}

sub eval_array_size {
    my $numElements = @_;
    return($numElements);
}

[download]
TIA guys.

----------
- Jim

In reply to Change this example to use references... by snafu

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