Thursday, 4:15 PM in Rangos III.
Pseudohashes lurched into being somewhere around 5.005. Not quite a hash, not quite an array and not nearly well enough documented, they've floated around in the back of the feature list behind things like threading and the Perl compiler. We'll try to get to know this misunderstood monster and see if it deserves to live or die as a Perl feature.
The basic concepts and use of pseudohashes will be explained along with its justification for existance. We'll examine the cases when they should and should not be used and their advantages and disadvantages over conventional techniques. We'll also poke into the fields and base modules and the opportunities they present for providing Perl with a more conventional OO system and how they fall short of that mark. If time permits, we'll dig around a bit in the perl source code to see how psuedohashes work.
The audience is expected to already be comfortable with arrays, hashes, references and objects. A little knowledge of C and the Perl internals wouldn't hurt as we'll be making a short detour into the perl source code. What documentation is available about pseudohashes can be found in the perlref man page, as well as the docs for the fields and base modules.
This talk should eventually spawn a tutorial man page about pseudohashes
for inclusion in the core.
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