Whither the pseudohash?

erikharrison has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm wary of asking a question when I can't show some code, but I didn't know where else to go.

I understand how to use a pseudohash - I've read the docs, tried it out.

What I want to know is why use the pseudohash. Keep in mind that I'm a hobby programmer - I don't use Perl on a regualr basis. I love to program, but I have to invent problems to solve, in order to do it. This may be why I don't see the (apparantly obvious) use of a pseudohash.

As a bonus, could anyone tell me if the pseudohash behavior is expected to change - the docs call it "experimental".

Cheers,
Erik

Comment on Whither the pseudohash? Download Code

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Re: Whither the pseudohash? by wog (Curate) on Mar 15, 2002 at 01:33 UTC
Pseudohash behavior will change. Quoth 'perldoc perlref' in a recent development version of perl: NOTE: The current user-visible implementation of pseudo- hashes (the weird use of the first array element) is deprecated starting from Perl 5.8.0 and will be removed in Perl 5.10.0, and the feature will be implemented differ ently. Not only is the current interface rather ugly, but the current implementation slows down normal array and hash use quite noticeably. The 'fields' pragma interface will remain available. So, if you want to use pseudohashes do it through `fields::phash`. As for why to use a pseudohash, what the fields pragma does is a good example. You can prevent yourself from accidentally accessing the "wrong" hash entry most of the time (and thus all the difficult to track down bugs that can cause).	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Whither the pseudohash? by IlyaM (Parson) on Mar 15, 2002 at 06:42 UTC
You may look on Tie::SecureHash. This is what TheDamian proposed as replacement for pseudohashes as long as you can afford perfomance hit caused by tie. -- Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)	[reply]

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