Programming PERL in the .NET Environment

Marshalling Types

Until this chapter, we wrote Core Perl programs without worrying about typing, as Perl has a dynamic typing system. .NET is a strong-typed environment: There is one-to-one correspondence between variables and types. In other words, every variable has one and only one type associated with it.

We do not have to change our attitude with respect to types if our PerlNET program contains Core Perl statements only. However, the problem may occur when working with .NET components and classes.^[2] As we saw in our first sample program, working with .NET classes involves calling methods.^[3] Many of the methods expect arguments, and we have to supply arguments of the correct type. Consider the following code example from the Marshalling\Types ...