cool beans, thanks. wow, perl is neat, but i fear it will make me a bad c programmer...;)
so i guess there is no concept of stack and heap space when dealing with perl? just that memory will stay allocated as long as there is a way to reach it? hehe, i can't wait to abuse that fact....;) christopher On Tuesday 17 December 2002 12:21 am, John W. Krahn wrote: > Christopher J Bottaro wrote: > > hmm, something is going off in my head that says this is scary. > > Calm down Christopher. :-) > > > @array is > > local to the function (lexically scoped as you would say in perl??) and > > you are returning a reference to it. > > Yes, that is correct. > > > well when the function goes out of scope, > > isn't @array deallocated (popped off the stack) and now that reference > > you returned is pointing to garbage? > > No, as long as there is still a reference to the array the data is > available. > > > or is perl's garbage collection sophisticated enough to realize the > > difference between: > > myfunc(); > > and > > my $ref = myfunc(); > > and not deallocate @array in the second example? > > Yes, that is correct. > > > also, i do understand that [ @array ] constructs and anonymous array, > > copies @array into it, then returns a reference to to the new anonymous > > array. as opposed to \@array which merely returns a reference to > > something that already exists. > > Yes, that is correct. > > > but i guess my questions is...well, i asked it above...about whether > > or not @array will still be in existance when the function ends... > > If you assign the reference to a scalar, then yes. > > > > John > -- > use Perl; > program > fulfillment -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
