Re: Passing references to a sub.

[the_slycer]

The other use of references is when you need to pass two arrays (or a hash and an array) into a sub.
Consider:

my @array1 = ("foo", "foo1", "foo2");
my @array2 = ("bar", "bar1", "bar2");

print_data(@array1, @array2);

sub print_data {
    @array1 = @_; #array1 gets all of @_
    @array2 = @_; #array2 also gets all of @_
}

vs

print_data(\@array1, \@array2);

sub print_data {
    my @data1 = @{$_[0]}; #dereferences first array into @data1
    my @data2 = @{$_[1]}; #dereferences second array into @data2
}

The second version is more often than not what you actually want.