Re: Is it possible to do pass by reference in Perl?

[bradcathey]

In fact, passing by reference is a must to preserve the values in separate data structures, even an array and scalar. For instance:

my @array = qw ( 1 2 3 4 5 );
my $num = 6;

&testsub ( @array, $num );

sub testsub {
   my ( @list, $single ) = @_;
   print @list;
}

will print:

123456

Passing those values via the @_ flattens all values into one long list. However:

my @array = qw ( 1 2 3 4 5 );
my $num = 6;

&testsub ( \@array, $num );

sub testsub {
   my ( $list, $single ) = @_;
   print @$list;
}

will print:

12345

where passing the array by ref will keep the values from all merging into the single list.