Implementing Swap [was Re: [Israel.pm] Report on Yesterday's Meeting]

[Gaal Yahas]

On Sun, Jun 05, 2005 at 08:04:50PM +0300, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> In the meeting, Shlomo used a swap($a, $b) function. Some people claimed it 
> could not be implemented in Perl, or only by using prototypes. But in fact it 
> can:
>
> sub swap
> {
>     my ($v1, $v2) = (@_);
>     $_[0] = $v2;
>     $_[1] = $v1;    
> }

If you know your arguments are not read-only, this works too.

     sub swap {
         ($_[1], $_[0]) = @_;
     }

     # fatal error
     print swap(1, 2);

     # ok
     my ($x, $y) = (1, 2);
     swap($x, $y); # (2, 1)

-- 
Gaal Yahas <gaal at forum2.org>
http://gaal.livejournal.com/