Hi --

On Mon, 11 Sep 2006, Mike Stok wrote:

>
> On 10-Sep-06, at 2:31 PM, dblack / wobblini.net wrote:
>
>> Which brings us back to:
>> 
>>> http://www.perl.org :-)  Perl has these "soft" or "symbolic"
>>> references, plus a whole chorus of people to tell you that you
>>> should use hashes instead :-)
>> 
>> :-)
>
> One of the reasons for the Perl chorus is that in Perl the "soft references" 
> can only point to non-lexical variables, and this can cause much opportunity 
> for enlightenment later!

Interesting.  I've always been part of the "use hashes" chorus (long
ago in Perl and now in Ruby), though I can't remember whether I ever
knew this or just vaguely perceived symbolic references as (usually)
involving very brittle and tightly coupled code.


David

-- 
                   David A. Black | dblack / wobblini.net
Author of "Ruby for Rails"   [1] | Ruby/Rails training & consultancy [3]
DABlog (DAB's Weblog)        [2] | Co-director, Ruby Central, Inc.   [4]
[1] http://www.manning.com/black | [3] http://www.rubypowerandlight.com
[2] http://dablog.rubypal.com    | [4] http://www.rubycentral.org