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in reply to Re: Re: Re: NEWBIE Brain Teaser
in thread NEWBIE Brain Teaser

i am not a "more monkish Monk", but i did get curious about this behavior of foreach. This is an alias (example modified from _Advanced Perl Programming_ (O'rielly) by Sriram Srinivasan): 
$a = 10;         # saclar a
@a = (1, 2, 3);  # array a
*b = *a;         # aliases b to a

$a++;            # increments $a :)
$b++;            # same as saying $a++
print "$b, $a";  # prints: 12 12

@b[0] = 4;       # same as saying $a[0] = 4

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as you can see, the aliasing on line 3 makes any manipulation of $b, @b or %b manipulate $a, @a, %a respectively. hope this helps and is not too confusing. if i'm wrong, tell me :)

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Re (tilly) 5: NEWBIE Brain Teaser
by tilly (Archbishop) on Apr 16, 2001 at 19:53 UTC
    That aliasing command relies on typeglobs to work.

    Therefore it will only work with global variables. (ie you must localize with local, not my.) I stay away from that except when it really doesn't make sense not to. :-)

    The mostly widely used form of that kind of aliasing in modern Perl is for exporting symbols using Exporter.

    FWIW one goal for Perl 6 is to kill typeglobs entirely. The functionality should be available, but by a different mechanism...

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