On 10/28/07, yitzle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Arrays can be set from lists and arrays get converted to lists all the time.
It's more accurate to say that an array in Perl is always an array *variable*. Whenever you read the word array, imagine the word "variable" after it, if that helps. A list in Perl is a list of scalars; a list is data. An array is the kind of variable which holds a list; a list is the kind of data which is stored in an array. You can use the list contained in an array, and you can store a list into an array. But the array is the container, and the list is the contents. > Is there any practical difference? (Other than the fact that an array > has a reference which can be passed as a scalar?) Yes, there's a practical difference; the same difference as that between a dozen eggs and the egg carton! Array operators, such as push and shift, work with an array; you can't push data onto anything but an array. List operators, such as sort, print, and reverse, work on lists, not arrays. A Perl subroutine may return a list, it may return a reference to an array; but it can't possibly return an array. We didn't always make this distinction clear in the early days of Perl and Perl documentation. It didn't help that scalar data is stored in scalar variables. It seemed natural to try to make it happen that arrays and lists could be considered "the same thing"; but (we realize now) a list is not an array. So for the past ten years or more, we've been trying to use the terminology correctly. Cheers! --Tom Phoenix Stonehenge Perl Training -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://learn.perl.org/
