Re: what do you infer from an array reference?

[kcott]

G'day purnak,

Years ago, when working on 32-bit systems, I used to get hexidecimal numbers (such as you posted: 9458b48) that would fit into 32 bits. Now, on a 64-bit system, I get hexidecimal numbers that won't fit into 32 bits (but will fit into 64 bits):

$ perl -E 'say []'
ARRAY(0x7fd8278040b0)

Of course, 9458b48 will also fit into 64 bits. I'd be very wary of making any inferences regarding the system architecture based on the hexidecimal number.

Although you only asked about array references, there are many other types of references, that follow the same pattern. Here's some examples:

$ perl -E 'say for [], {}, \"", sub {}'
ARRAY(0x7ff6d60040b0)
HASH(0x7ff6d602bf70)
SCALAR(0x7ff6d602c948)
CODE(0x7ff6d602c960)

The ref function has a more complete list; perlref has, in its own words, "complete documentation about all aspects of references".

Finally, as an adjunct to ++Eily's reply, here's a recent post where the equality of references was used.

[purnak]

Thanks Ken.. This was informative.