On Sun, Jul 01, 2001 at 01:15:52PM -0500, Jay Strauss wrote:
> Doooh, I knew that. I stared at that thing for 30 min and didn't notice. I
> don't really understand the mention of using strict and using references.
> Seems OK to me.
In perl there are `hard' and `symbolic' references. Hard refs are the normal
kind; the variable holding the ref contains opaque data.
Symbolic refs are really just strings. When you use a string in a context the
requires a reference, perl automagically supplies a hard reference to the
variable or function whose name (minus the prefix $, @, %, *, or &) is the
string found in the symbolic ref variable.
This can be useful sometimes, but is guaranteed to cause confusion a lot of
the time because it is terribly easy to mistakenly pass the variable holding
the data instead of a reference to it, leading to unexplained program failure
with no error message. The strict refs pragma disallows symbolic refs. I
happen to disagree with the previous poster: this is very much a good thing
if you do not indent to use sylbolic refs.
--
Henry House
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