Grouping perl foreach values

Richard Cottrill richard_c at tpg.com.au
Tue Jul 9 20:45:41 EST 2002


> From: linux-admin at lists.samba.org [mailto:linux-admin at lists.samba.org]On
> Behalf Of Damien Elmes

> Not really trivial. You need to use either references to 3
> element lists, or
> a variant on what Alex suggested, a list of hashes references.
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Damien Elmes

I'll chip in now that this looks more or less settled.

After making some truly horrible Perl code, while figuring out what worked
best for me, I came to the conclusion that structuring the data made life a
LOT easier. The ugliness of Perl only became apparent when the data
structures became deeply nested. Once I wrote a data structure sufficiently
deep that, to access it, I could either use a dozen single use variables or
one line and a huge comment. I decided that the "one line, huge comment"
approach was 'better' (but just barely).

Michael, I'd go for a list of hashes if I were in your shoes. You could make
the argument list a Perl list too if you're going to fiddle with them much
more. I really like hashes (with nice names); they make the code infinitely
more readable. Hashes using vague IDs as the index don't do so much for me
anymore.

Does Perl support sparse arrays well? Anyone?

Richard





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