Re: A Simple Question From A Simple Man

[Anonymous Monk]

This notion of "a reference" ("arrayref" is slang for "a reference to an array," etc.) is one of the most-important concepts in Perl. A reference is a single value ... what's called a "scalar" ... yet it can refer to anything at all. For example, even though arrays are one-dimensional, every slot in it could consist of a reference to another array, thus creating a n-dimensional array, and so on. "Contexts" (array, hash, scalar, etc.), as denoted by characters "@", "$", "%" and so on, are also a very important idea.

[TinkerTantrum]

So what you are saying (if I'm right) is that an "arrayref" can be treated as a scalar?

[Athanasius]

No, an array reference is a scalar:

my @array     = ('Matthew', 'Mark', 'Luke', 'John');
my $array_ref = \@array;
my @new_array =  @{ $array_ref };
print join(', ', @new_array);

Here, @array is an array, as indicated by the “@” sigil, and $array_ref is a scalar, as per the “$” sigil. The syntax @{ ... } takes an array reference (which must be a scalar), and dereferences it to get the array it references.

Here is something to meditate on: In Perl, an array can contain any number of elements, but each element must be a scalar. So, to make complex data structures (like N-dimensional arrays or arrays of hashes) you need some way of getting non-scalars (arrays or hashes) to act as scalars so they can be elements in the larger array. Which is where references come in: they are scalars which can be used to access other things, and those other things can be non-scalars.

In addition to the reading recommendations given above by other monks, you might want to check out the Monastery’s tutorial intro to references.

Hope that helps,