(Message perl:7200) /home/mjd/bin/mailpager 7200 Return-Path: mjd@plover.com Delivery-Date: Sat Mar 09 21:53:36 2002 Return-Path: Delivered-To: mjd-filter-deliver2@plover.com Received: (qmail 24362 invoked by uid 119); 9 Mar 2002 21:53:36 -0000 Delivered-To: mjd-filter@plover.com Received: (qmail 24349 invoked by uid 119); 9 Mar 2002 21:53:33 -0000 Delivered-To: mjd@plover.com Received: (qmail 24344 invoked by uid 119); 9 Mar 2002 21:53:33 -0000 Message-ID: <20020309215333.24343.qmail@plover.com> To: perl5-portesr@perl.org cc: mjd@plover.com Subject: PATCH [perlreftut] Organization: Plover Systems Date: Sat, 09 Mar 2002 16:53:33 -0500 From: Mark-Jason Dominus Learned Porters, I recently received cranky email objecting to the presence of Bill Clinton in perlreftut. Normally, I ignore cranky email, but in this case, the author did have a point: The reference is out of date (and, as originally worded, USA-centric). Furthermore, the current President furnishes a more concrete example of the situation described in the following paragraph. (This accounts for the omission of the usual 'W' in these examples.) So in the interests of modernization and better pedagogy, I submit the enclosed patch. I remain, Mark-Jason "See you in 2004" Dominus --- pod/perlreftut.pod 2002/03/09 21:34:56 1.1 +++ pod/perlreftut.pod 2002/03/09 21:35:26 @@ -65,14 +65,14 @@ A reference is a scalar value that I an entire array or an entire hash (or to just about anything else). Names are one kind of -reference that you're already familiar with. Think of the President: -a messy, inconvenient bag of blood and bones. But to talk about him, -or to represent him in a computer program, all you need is the easy, -convenient scalar string "Bill Clinton". +reference that you're already familiar with. Think of the President +of the United States: a messy, inconvenient bag of blood and bones. +But to talk about him, or to represent him in a computer program, all +you need is the easy, convenient scalar string "George Bush". References in Perl are like names for arrays and hashes. They're Perl's private, internal names, so you can be sure they're -unambiguous. Unlike "Bill Clinton", a reference only refers to one +unambiguous. Unlike "George Bush", a reference only refers to one thing, and you always know what it refers to. If you have a reference to an array, you can recover the entire array from it. If you have a reference to a hash, you can recover the entire hash. But the