Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 13:26:54 -0500
Cc: "'ny@lists.pm.org'" 
Subject: Re: Perl tips

On Thu, Feb 22, 2001 at 12:50:54PM -0500, Brightman, Derek wrote:
> Does anyone subscribe to Tech Republic?  They have been posting perl
> programming tips.  With my high level of technical expertise, I am a great
> judge of the quality of their tips (NOT!!)

I'd say that it's a pretty poor-quality tip.

> $os = @{${$platform}{operating_system}};  

First, since assigning an array to a scalar stores the number of elements
in the array in the scalar, $os is a poor choice of variable name, and the
motivation behind this data structure is hardly clear.  Besides, this
dereference is probably better written as

	@{ $platform->{operating_system} };

The blurb is correct in noting that nested dereferences can become confusing,
which is why the $ref->{} syntactic sugar exists.  One never needs to do more
than one @{...} style dereference in an expression, and I personally find it
clearer to keep them to a minimum.

Ben