Re^3: Entering the land of Perl

[jwkrahn]

Notice that I have to dereference it after the passage. So the hope is that there is no copying.

In your code you have:

sub sort_and_print_hash_keys (\%) {
    my %hash = %{shift()};
    foreach (sort keys %hash) {
        print "$hash{$_} ";
    }
    print "\n";
}

Which is copying the entire hash.    If you didn't want to copy the hash you could do it like this:

sub sort_and_print_hash_keys (\%) {
    my $hash = shift;
    foreach (sort keys %$hash) {
        print "$hash->{$_} ";
    }
    print "\n";
}