Re^2: Canon concerning coderef calls?

in reply to Re: Canon concerning coderef calls?
in thread Canon concerning coderef calls?

This works beautifully, but this novice is at a loss to understand why.

Is not $:: an indicator that the sub is in the main package? So that $::{$_} is the subroutine $_ in the main package? And then that is called with the arguments $_?

Why does this allow us to do the referencing/dereferencing in one step, is this novice missing something here?

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Re^3: Canon concerning coderef calls? by NetWallah (Canon) on Nov 15, 2004 at 20:19 UTC
Yes - you have understood the sequence correctly. The relevant document is the "Symbol Table" section of perlmod. The symbol table for a package happens to be stored in the hash of that name with two colons appended. The main symbol table's name is thus %main::, or %:: for short. ... Hence "$::" is de-referencing the "%main::" hash, using "$_" as the key. The following parens prvide the "sub" context, and allow the sub to be passed the $_ param. Earth first! (We'll rob the other planets later)	[reply]
Re^4: Canon concerning coderef calls? by jobi (Scribe) on Nov 15, 2004 at 21:50 UTC
Ah, so that's how it works... I didn't realize that the main package was named `%main` and not `$main`, so I didn't see the dereference there. Thank you for taking the time to explain, and thanks to tmoertel for granting us his wisdom in the first place. jobi - a little bit wiser now.	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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