in reply to Re^2: The Concept of References
in thread The Concept of References
You don't, because doing so would violate the guarantee that you cannot buffer overflow in Perl. But, there are good reasons why C gives you the rope to buffer overflow.
Let's say you want to iterate through the characters of a string and do something with each character. In C, that's pretty simple. Strings are just arrays of characters and arrays are just fancy pointers.
Now, let's say you want to do the same thing in Perl. There's a few ways, but none are anywhere as efficient.char string[] = "Hello"; char *ptr; fr ( ptr = string; *ptr; ptr++ ) { do_something_with( *ptr ); // This is a single char }
foreach my $char ( split //, $string ) { ... } while ( $string =~ /(.)/g ) { my $char = $1; ... } for ( my $i = 0; $i <= length $string; $i++ ) { my $char = substr( $st +ring, $index, 1 ); ... }
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