RE: [misterhouse-users] associative arrays

[Bruce W. <br...@mi...>]

From the mis-spoken Bruce:

>Yep, $serial is a scalar (that is a pointer to the object data), so I think
>you can use it as an index to your own hash array for whatever you want to
>do.   That is what I do with the '%menu_items_by_object' array in mh.

From the wiser Frank:

> References used as hash keys are converted to strings, and can't be
> converted back. You can use Tie::RefHash or some other
> indirection mechanism if this functionality is necessary.

Frank be right.  I had forgotten that detail.  You CAN use an object as an
index (as I do in that mh %menu_items_by_object array), but you can not then
use the index of that array as an object again.

If you are simply trying to loop thru a set of objects, a cleaner approach
would be to store a list array of objects.  For example:

$serial1 = new Serial_Item(...);
$serial2 = new Serial_Item(...);
my @serials = ($serial1, $serial2);

for my $object (@serials) {
	set $object 1;
}

Bruce