SAMS Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours THIRD EDITION

Hour 13. References and Structures

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• The basics of references

• Common structures of references

• A brief example to help all this make sense

If Perl is your first programming language, you'll find this hour especially interesting. In most programming languages, one piece of data can be used as a reference to some other piece of data. Sometimes the piece of data used that way is called a pointer (Pascal or C); sometimes the technique is called indirect referencing (assembly language); some languages have no explicit concept of pointers at all (BASIC or Java). If you've never used references, pointers, or indirect referencing before, you may need to read parts of this chapter more than once; it can be confusing.

In Perl ...