Re^3: A C-like brain in a Perl-like world

[runrig]

Sorry for the reply to an old-node, but I was wondering what you meant by "reference-safe", and thought you might mean something like the following (which I thought might emit a "Modification of a read-only value" error if the $_ in the for loop were still referring to the keys of the hash), but it seems to work just fine without error (tested on 5.6 and 5.8):

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

sub merge {                  
 my %hash;                   
 @hash{@_} = ();             
 sort keys %hash;            
}                            
                             
my @array1 = qw(a b c d e);  
my @array2 = qw(c d e f g);  
for (merge(@array1, @array2)) {
  $_++;
  print "$_\n";
}

[Aristotle]

Your code will return stringified references if any were part of the list it was passed. The code I wrote preserves references as references. It’s not a huge deal – after all, while you may sometimes want a list of unique references, it’s unlikely that you’ll want them sorted on the stringified value of the reference. But it might still save you from getting bitten somewhere else, depending on how locally the function is used.