Edit: /usr/share/perl5/pod/perldsc.pod (25614B)
=head1 NAME
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perldsc - Perl Data Structures Cookbook
=head1 DESCRIPTION
Perl lets us have complex data structures. You can write something like
this and all of a sudden, you'd have an array with three dimensions!
for my $x (1 .. 10) {
for my $y (1 .. 10) {
for my $z (1 .. 10) {
$AoA[$x][$y][$z] =
$x ** $y + $z;
}
}
}
Alas, however simple this may appear, underneath it's a much more
elaborate construct than meets the eye!
How do you print it out? Why can't you say just C? How do
you sort it? How can you pass it to a function or get one of these back
from a function? Is it an object? Can you save it to disk to read
back later? How do you access whole rows or columns of that matrix? Do
all the values have to be numeric?
As you see, it's quite easy to become confused. While some small portion
of the blame for this can be attributed to the reference-based
implementation, it's really more due to a lack of existing documentation with
examples designed for the beginner.
This document is meant to be a detailed but understandable treatment of the
many different sorts of data structures you might want to develop. It
should also serve as a cookbook of examples. That way, when you need to
create one of these complex data structures, you can just pinch, pilfer, or
purloin a drop-in example from here.
Let's look at each of these possible constructs in detail. There are separate
sections on each of the following:
=over 5
=item * arrays of arrays
=item * hashes of arrays
=item * arrays of hashes
=item * hashes of hashes
=item * more elaborate constructs
=back
But for now, let's look at general issues common to all
these types of data structures.
=head1 REFERENCES
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The most important thing to understand about all data structures in
Perl--including multidimensional arrays--is that even though they might
appear otherwise, Perl C<@ARRAY>s and C<%HASH>es are all internally
one-dimensional. They can hold only scalar values (meaning a string,
number, or a reference). They cannot directly contain other arrays or
hashes, but instead contain I to other arrays or hashes.
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You can't use a reference to an array or hash in quite the same way that you
would a real array or hash. For C or C++ programmers unused to
distinguishing between arrays and pointers to the same, this can be
confusing. If so, just think of it as the difference between a structure
and a pointer to a structure.
You can (and should) read more about references in L.
Briefly, references are rather like pointers that know what they
point to. (Objects are also a kind of reference, but we won't be needing
them right away--if ever.) This means that when you have something which
looks to you like an access to a two-or-more-dimensional array and/or hash,
what's really going on is that the base type is
merely a one-dimensional entity that contains references to the next
level. It's just that you can I