Re: Benifits of using hash rather than number of variables?

[DrHyde]

The three big advantages of passing hashes / hashrefs to your subroutines are:

1. you have named parameters inside the subroutine, and you don't have to remember the order of arguments outside the subroutine;
2. much easier to handle optional arguments, and to calculate which arguments to pass at runtime;
3. easy to build up that hash a little bit at a time;

The big disadvantage of using hashes is that you lose some strictness checking. use strict will usually tell you if you mis-type a variable name, but it can't tell you if you mis-type a hash key - instead, if you mis-type a key name when reading the hash, it'll just auto-vivify. This sort of bug can be a real pain in the arse to track down.

Thankfully, there's a solution to this problem on the CPAN. Tie::Hash::Vivify is meant to let you provide "a hash where if you read a key that doesn't exist, it will call a code reference to fill that slot with a value", but it can of course be used thus:

use Tie::Hash::Vivify;
use Carp qw(confess);
use Data::Dumper;
...
my $hashref = Tie::Hash::Vivify->new(sub {
  confess("No auto-vivifying!\n".Dumper(\@_))
});