comment on

It is called "autovivification". Have a read through perlreftut and perlref.

You have seen it happen in a light weight way whenever you assign a value to an array element that hadn't been used before. It is a little more interesting in the case of a reference which you are using for the first time, but is one of the underpinnings of creating and managing "interesting" data structures in Perl, as indeed was the case here.

My pleasure, education is a large part of what PerlMonks is about.

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

In reply to Re^3: hash and array mismatch by GrandFather
in thread hash and array mismatch by dana

Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.


Syntactic Confectionery Delight
	PerlMonks