Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!munnari.oz.au!frankland-river!pem
From: pem@frankland-river.aaii.oz.au (Paul E. Maisano)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Passing scalars by reference
Message-ID: <1220@frankland-river.aaii.oz.au>
Date: 6 Mar 90 05:04:08 GMT
Organization: Australian AI Institute
Lines: 22

Could someone please tell me how I can pass scalars by reference in the
same way arrays are. I know I can refer to $_[nnn] like its says in the
manual, but I would like to do something like:

sub foo {
    local($x_by_ref_with_meaningful_name) = $_[0];
    ...
    $x_by_ref_with_meaningful_name .= $foo;	# update the original scalar
}

I tried this and it seemed to work on the first call only. Thereafter
it updated a global variable called $x_by_ref_with_meaningful_name.

Hopefully it's not a bug and I'm just doing something wrong.
It's happening on both SUN-3's and sparcstations, pl 12.

------------------
Paul E. Maisano
Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute
1 Grattan St. Carlton, Vic. 3053, Australia
Ph: +613 663-7922  Fax: +613 663-7937
Email: pem@aaii.oz.au   UUCP: {uunet,mcsun,ukc,nttlab}!munnari!aaii.oz.au!pem