Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Notational Convenience

One of the nice things about variables is that they interpolate. One of the not-so-nice things about functions is that they don’t. You can use a tied array to make a function that can be interpolated. Suppose you want to interpolate random integers in a string. You can just say:

#!/usr/bin/perl
package RandInterp;
sub TIEARRAY { bless \my $self };
sub FETCH { int rand $_[1] };

package main;
tie @rand, "RandInterp";
for (1,10,100,1000) {
    print "A random integer less than $_ would be $rand[$_]\n";
}
$rand[32] = 5;    # Will this reformat our system disk?

When run, this prints:

A random integer less than 1 would be 0
A random integer less than 10 would be 3
A random integer less than 100 would be 46
A random integer less than 1000 would be 755
Can't locate object method "STORE" via package "RandInterp" at foo line 10.

As you can see, it’s no big deal that we didn’t even implement STORE. It just blows up like normal.