Re: Slicing a hash reference from a collection of hash references within a hash reference

[Anonymous Monk]

And as far as "getting your head around references" goes, just remember that they are a special type of scalar that "refers to" something else. Anything can be referred-to, and everything has a reference-count so that it will not disappear until all references are gone. (Mumble about "weakened" references ...) And, as far as "in one line" goes, don't be too concerned about that. It is not "a sign of a newbie" to use more source-code lines.

[muba]

It is not "a sign of a newbie" to use more source-code lines.

To the contrary, indeed. Just recently, I was hacking together a piece of code that featured a map within a map. Sure, the whole thing fitted on one "line", if your definition of "line" is somewhat liberal:

$some_object->one_method->other_method( [map { ... } map {...} @$sourc
+e_aref] )

Which, in reality, looked more like:

$some_object->one_method->other_method( [
   map {
      ...
   } map {
      ...
   } @$source_aref
]);

But then I was looking at it, and I shook my head. Sure, it worked. But was it "clean" code? Not by a long stretch: I could either slap multiple lines on comments on it, explaining what was going on, or refactor the whole thing:

use subs qw(
    fribble_aref
    frobble_aref
);

my $results_aref =
  fribble_aref
    frobble_aref
      $source_aref
;
my $other_object = $some_object->one_method;
$other_object->other_method( $results_aref );

sub fribble_aref {
    return [map { ... } @{+shift}];
}

sub frobble_aref {
    return [map { ... } @{+shift}];
}

The final solution definitely took more lines, but it also was way more comprehensible.