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Postings from January 2005
When I changed the example from "Bill Clinton" to "George Bush", I introduced an unexpected complication: there are two Presidents named "George Bush"! This has confused some people about my intended meaning. Some people thought I was trying to draw attention to the ambiguity of the reference "George Bush". But I wasn't. I hope this patch clears it up. --- pod/perlreftut.pod 2005/01/02 09:30:04 1.1 +++ pod/perlreftut.pod 2005/01/02 09:30:18 @@ -68,11 +68,11 @@ reference that you're already familiar with. Think of the President of the United States: a messy, inconvenient bag of blood and bones. But to talk about him, or to represent him in a computer program, all -you need is the easy, convenient scalar string "George Bush". +you need is the easy, convenient scalar string "George W. Bush". References in Perl are like names for arrays and hashes. They're Perl's private, internal names, so you can be sure they're -unambiguous. Unlike "George Bush", a reference only refers to one +unambiguous. Unlike "George W. Bush", a reference only refers to one thing, and you always know what it refers to. If you have a reference to an array, you can recover the entire array from it. If you have a reference to a hash, you can recover the entire hash. But theThread Next