I tried it out and see that this works, but it doesn't seem to me that it should, since you appear to be storing a reference to the function in the array rather than the list of values returned by the function. Is this just a technique for deferring execution of getarray until the foreach my $val (@array) or is something else going on here?

No deferrence going on here - &get_array() simple returns an array and not a reference (sub or array). Maybe this code will shed some light:

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

print Dumper get_array();
print Dumper get_array_ref();

print Dumper scalar get_something();
print Dumper get_something();

sub get_array {
   return ('a'..'d');
}

sub get_array_ref {
   return [('a'..'d')];
}

sub get_something {
   return wantarray ? ('a'..'d') : 'scalar';
}
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Also check out the difference between a list and an array

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

thanks, i appreciate all your help :)
Im going to use all that info right now
^jasper <jasper@wintermarket.org>

I get (no pun intended) how the original get_array works. What I'm unclear on is why you called it with &get_array() instead of just get_array(). I'm used to seeing \& used when setting up references to subs, but this is the first time I've encountered &subname() without the backslash.

That line just calls the sub and puts whatever is returned into @array. If you wanted to store a reference to a sub you would do this:

my $subref = \&getarray;
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