--- Etienne Marcotte <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This is a very newbie question..
> 
> When sending arguments to a sub, is it preferable to send a pointer to
> this value or the value itself. Or after x arguments it's better to send
> references?
> 
> Etienne

Etienne,

I think Brett W. McCoy gave an excellent answer to your question.  I just have one 
point to
clarify:  in Perl, we do not have pointers (the analogue is called a reference) in the 
sense that
you might see them in C.  For example, in C, you can directly manipulate the value of 
a pointer to
access other areas of memory.  This is not possible in Perl:

    my @array = qw/ 1 2 3 4 /;
    my $scalar_ref = \$var;
    $scalar_ref++; # WRONG!

Example of output:

    C:\>perl -e "$z=[qw/1 2 3 4/];print $z"
    ARRAY(0x1a7f018)
    
    C:\>perl -e "$z=[qw/1 2 3 4/];print ++$z"
    27783193

I assume you know this, but I thought I would toss that out there, in case you weren't.

Cheers,
Curtis "Ovid" Poe

=====
Senior Programmer
Onsite! Technology (http://www.onsitetech.com/)
"Ovid" on http://www.perlmonks.org/

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