On 3/27/06, Practical Perl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thanks all. > Again,how about the difference about a pointer and a reference?
Perl does Grabage Collection (cleaning up unused memory) for you. It does this by keeping a count of the number of references a block of memory has. When this count reaches zero the memory can be marked as unused. If Perl had C like pointers they could be considered weak references (ones that did not increment the number of references to the block memory). Luckily it is quite hard to achieve that effect in Perl (it is possible) since it would cause the same sort of problems pointers cause in C (pointing to blocks of unused memory, confusion about what is being pointed to, null pointers, etc.). For more information you should read http://perldoc.perl.org/perlreftut.html http://perldoc.perl.org/perlref.html or perldoc perlreftut perldoc perlref -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
