Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!psueea!parsely!agora!markb
From: markb@agora.UUCP (Mark Biggar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Variable variables
Message-ID: <1894@agora.UUCP>
Date: 21 Feb 90 07:31:42 GMT
References: <29987@sparkyfs.istc.sri.com>
Organization: Organization?  You've got to be kidding!
Lines: 29

In article <29987@sparkyfs.istc.sri.com> zwicky@sparkyfs.itstd.sri.com (Elizabeth Zwicky) writes:
>I have an array, @devices, consisting of a list of device names read
>from the command line. For each of those devices, I need an array
>consisting of the machines supposed to be backed up to that device.
>What I would like to do is something like this, were this grammatical:
>	
>	foreach $device (@devices){
>      		@$device = something;
>        }

Beside the various solutions using eval, you can also use the index
concatenation feature of associative arrays
	
	$i = 1;
	foreach $device (@devices) {
		$DEV{$device,$i++} = something;
	}

The elements of the list in the {} are concatenated to produce the actual
index string used (as opposed to @DEV{$x,$y} which produces the list of 
elements selected.)  This feature can be used to produce may useful data
structures like sparce and ragged arrays.  Constant separaters can easily be 
introduced to the list to allow parsing actual indecies out of the 
index returned from keys().

--

FROM SOMEONE THERE AT THE BEGINING
Mark Biggar