What?? it is supposed to return the next to the highest? Oh... My gosh.......this thing wants the index of highest value, not the highest value itself!! Should have read more carefully.. That of course changes things Ooops...Do not write code before consuming at least one full cup of coffee!
Update:
Ok, if the problem statement requires returning an index, then the most natural formulation would be to use indices. Here is how that looks when a reference to the array is passed to the sub. I just completely blew it and missed that key piece of info, probably because working with an index is a very rare in my coding. More usual in my problem space might be to return a reference to an entire row of a multidimensional array that matches some criteria. additional comment: I remember needing indices when working with some kinds of tk widgets. So a requirement for this sort of thing definitely exists.
use strict;
use warnings;
sub get_max_index
{
my $arrayRef = shift;
my $imax = 0;
for my $i (0..@$arrayRef-1){
$imax = $i if $arrayRef->[$i] > $arrayRef->[$imax];
}
return $imax;
}
my @arr = (1..10);
my $ans = get_max_index(\@arr); #pass reference to array!
print"$ans\n";