http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=439951


in reply to Re^2: passing arrays to subroutines
in thread passing arrays to subroutines

Just to expand on this point for the OP's benefit, consider:

use strict; use Dumpvalue; my $dumper = Dumpvalue->new(); my @a = (3, 1, 4, 1); my @b = (5, 9); my @c = (2, 6, 5); sub ex1 { map 10*$_, @_; } $dumper->dumpValue([ex1(@a)]); print "\n"; # array refs sub ex2 { map scalar @$_, @_; } $dumper->dumpValue([ex2(\@a, \@b, \@c)]); print "\n"; # implicit array refs through prototypes sub ex3 (\@\@\@) { map scalar @$_, @_; } $dumper->dumpValue([ex3(@a, @b, @c)]); print "\n"; __END__ 0 30 1 10 2 40 3 10 0 4 1 2 2 3 0 4 1 2 2 3
Note that the bodies of ex2 and ex3 are identical. IMO, however, ex2 is superior, because it can take as arguments any number of array refs, whereas ex3 must take exactly three arrays as arguments.

Follow-up question: is there any way to define a sub that takes as input one or more arrays?

the lowliest monk