To be perfectly honest, study was one of the very few places in the Perl Developer's Dictionary where I copped out and didn't include an example of the syntax in an actual program. Why?

Following the guidelines in the Camel, online docs, and what I could grok of the source code, I kept coming up with seriously contrived uses. Okay, I did find a few uses that seemed to apply and didn't look so bad. So like any "optimization" scheme, I set up some benchmarks so that I could recommend it or at least further specify *exactly* where study benefits.

By the time that I had a broad list of examples where studywas beneficial, and a list where it didn't help (or even hurt) performance it would have taken several pages to explain *why* it works this way -- and along the way dancing around implementation details of the language that I really didn't care to explain. Very, very small changes in the input data would cause large swings in the benchmark timings. I didn't want a huge checklist of cases and exceptions with disclaimers making the whole thing moot anyway.

So I documented what I found (which is essentially what the Camel 3ed and the docs say) but with even broader warnings and more vigorous handwaving.

In reply to Re: Why study a SCALAR? by clintp
in thread Why study SCALAR? by mrbbking

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