* Siegfried Heintze <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-05-06T01:02:59]
> I've been studying this sample code that someone gave to me in response to
> one of my earlier queries. Why is it not necessary to put a "&" in front of
> DBH in the statement DBH->prepare?
> sub DBH { [ ... ] }
>
> my $sth = DBH->prepare ( qq { ... } );
Because, well... it isn't! In Perl 5, it is more useful to start with
the assumption that sub calls don't need to be prefix with & and then
find the exceptions, rather than the reverse. Do you have a specific
reason to think that a & should be required here?
Here are some of the reasons you'd need &:
The subroutine has a prototype, and you want to circumvent it.
sub foo($$) { ... }
&foo(1);
You want to pass @_ as the arguments to the called function.
sub foo { &bar; } # passes the arguments to foo to bar
You're calling a subroutine reference.
$foo = sub { ... };
&$foo;
If you don't need to use the &, avoid it. It's noisy.
--
rjbs
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