"David L. Nicol" wrote:
>
> What if its a method of anything in an array? $_ is already
> a reference to the object on the array in for loops rather
> than a copy of it. What if we make change be not something about
> for loops, but about anything in an array?
>
> print "The index, in its array, of <<$_>> is $CORE::ARRAY_INDEX{$_}"
>
> where %CORE::ARRAY_INDEX is a very magical system-provided hash that
> tells us the index in its array of something that is in an array. It
> is often undefined; and would get tricky but definable for objects that
> can be in multiple containers at once, I'd think it would be the index
> of the item in the most recent container it was accessed from.
>
> If we are going to have arrays that can be sparse, we've pretty much got
> to keep track of this info somehow anyway, so might as well give a way
> to access it.
I think an array element, being a scalar value, should not be aware of
the array it's a part of. You should be able to go from array to value,
but not back. Think about it: elements can be part of multiple arrays
at the same time, a reference to an element will persist even if the
element is shifted off the array, etc.
What might be useful instead, is to define a function that can be used
on the control variable of a foreach loop:
foreach my $elem (@array) {
print "The value of array elem '", position($elem), "' is
'$elem'\n";
}
Hildo
