[Melbourne-pm] returning hashes and arrays, source filters considered harmful?

[Alfie John]

I know it's a bit evil, but you could probably hook into Perl magic (see
perlguts):

  foreach my $person ( $people ) {
    ...
  }

Here, $people is a magic perl variable which checks what context it is being
used in.

However, it's evil so forget I said anything.

Alfie

On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Toby Corkindale <
toby.corkindale at strategicdata.com.au> wrote:

> On 19/02/10 10:16, Sam Watkins wrote:
>
>> A quick question.  Supposing I want to return an array from my_func(), I
>> can do
>> like:
>>
>>        ...
>>          return @foo;
>>        }
>>
>>        @foo = my_func();
>>
>> but I normally do it like this because I feel like it should be more
>> efficient:
>>
>>        ...
>>          return \@foo;
>>        }
>>
>>        $foo = my_func();
>>
>> This has the unfortunate effect of converting my array to an array ref.
>>  If I
>> wanted to reverse that, I think I could use:
>>
>>        @foo = @{my_func()};
>>
>> which is getting ugly and inefficient too.  The same thing happens when
>> returning hash variables, except that I suppose it is even more
>> inefficient to
>> return it via a list return compared to a reference.
>>
>> My question is, does perl actually optimize this so it sucks less than I
>> am
>> naively supposing it does?  Also, is there any way to make like an alias
>> @foo
>> for @$foo, so you can treat an array reference as a normal array without
>> writing @$foo all the time?  (and also for hashes)
>>
>
> No, Perl does not optimise it for you, so returning references is
> definitely better for performance.
> There isn't any language syntax for the aliasing you're talking about
> either.
>
>
>  These concerns make me reluctant to use normal perl @array and %hash types
>> at
>> all.  If I have to pass and return things by reference, and can't alias
>> these
>> back to normal @array and %hash types, I would prefer to use references
>> for
>> everything in order to be consistent and avoid having to rewrite code when
>> I
>> suddenly need to pass some variable to or from a sub.  This would make the
>> @foo
>> %bar syntax useless for anything but the one-liners.  So I'm hoping there
>> is
>> some workaround or optimization, and a way to alias them.
>>
>
> Luckily there is. Use the Moose. I think Drew mentioned that in the quoted
> but unrelated text I cut from the bottom of this email. Have you
> investigated Moose yet?
>
> Cheers,
> Toby
>
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