[kw-pm] a philosophical question about hashes

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, John Macdonald wrote:

> There are certainly times when having the key inside the value is
> useful.  If you have a subroutine that operates on a single value
> record, it could easily need to know the value of the key as well as
> the others parts of the record.  It's easier to pass it a single
> coherent value than to have to pass the key as well.
>
>     process_record( $structure{$_} ) for (@interesting_keys);

in the general case, of course, if i want multiple keys, i'd create a
hash value structure that contained all of those key values, then just
create distinct hashes for each key.  but i don't think i need to get
that carried away just yet.

rday