Re: References to hash elements?

On Jan 6, 2004, at 1:31 PM, Simon Cozens wrote:

> Jeff Clites:
>> But here what I'm copying is the _contents_ of the hash slot.
>
> True, but irrelevant. :)
>
>> And here I'm not making a copy, but also the thing I'm taking a
>> reference to is not the same thing I copied above. Here, it's a
>> reference to a hash slot.
>
> No, it isn't. It's a reference to a PMC. The fact that that PMC happens
> to be pointed to by a hash key is incidental. It's still just another 
> PMC.
> No special case at all.

Oh, I see what you are saying. I was misinterpreting what \$hash{bar} 
is supposed to do. (I was thinking there was supposed to be some new 
way to reference a hash slot, such that assigning to the reference [or 
dereferencing and assigning] would be equivalent to using $hash{bar} as 
an l-value.)

(But saying something is a PMC doesn't clarify anything--basically 
everything ends up being a PMC. PerlStrings are PMCs, hashes are PMCs; 
we have reference PMCs.... If we had a reference-to-a-hash-slot, that 
would be a PMC also probably. So your original post threw me off track 
when you referred to "a PMC rather than an immediate value".)

But I get it now--thanks!

JEff