[Melbourne-pm] passing arrays and hashes

[Tim Connors]

I thought I was doing the proper thing by passsing a reference to a hash 
and dereferncing it in a function, rather than passing the entire hash 
around the place all the time.

sub blah($$$) {
  my ($file,$md5sum,$trashmd5p)=(@_);
  my %trashmd5=%$trashmd5p;
...
}

blah($file,$md5sum,\%trashmd5) ...


I found this much much slower than I was expecting.  As an experiment, I 
decided just to pass the hash straight to the function:

sub blah($$%) {
  my ($file,$md5sum,%trashmd5)=(@_);
...
}

blah($file,$md5sum,%trashmd5) ...

This was a bit quicker.

And of course, just using a global was very quick.

I think I can see why passing the reference is slow -- perl wants to go 
through and create a whole new hash in this stage creating a duplicate 
reference to every item in %$trashmd5p:
  my %trashmd5=%$trashmd5p;

It doesn't realise %trashmd5 is only a readonly copy, and that it would 
suffice simply to derefence it just like in C.

Having found my workaround, and this being part of a very long running 
script, I don't particularly feel the want to experiment much more, but 
what is the way around this?  Being a readonly copy, can I simply adopt 
the slightly more verbose referencing to ${$trashmd5p}{key} everytime 
instead of $trashmd5{key}, and this wouldn't go and recreate a fresh hash 
from scratch?

-- 
Tim Connors