3.3.2 Associated Scalars

Every time an array variable is declared, a special set of scalar variables automatically springs into existence, and those scalars change along with changes in the array with which they are associated.

First of all, for an array, @array, of n elements. There are scalar variables $array[0], $array[1], ..., $array[n-1] that contain first, second, third, ..., nth elements in the array, respectively. The variables in this format are full-fledged scalar variables. This means that anything you can do with a scalar variable, you can do with these elements. This provides a way to access array elements by subscript. In addition, it provides a way to change, modify and update individual elements without actually using the @array variable.

Another scalar variable that is associated to any array variable, @array, is $#array. This variable always contains the subscript of the last element in the array. In other words, $array[$#array] is always the last element of the array. The length of the array is always $#array + 1. Again, you are permitted to do anything with this variable that you can normally do with any other scalar variable; however, you must always make sure to leave the value as an integer greater than or equal to -1. In fact, if you know an array is going to grow very large quickly, you probably want to set this variable to a very high value. When you change the value of $#array, you not only resize the array for your use, you also direct Perl to allocate a specific amount of space for @array.

Here are a few examples that use the associated scalar variables for an array:

use strict;
my @someStuff = qw/Hello and 
                  welcome/;     # @someStuff: an array of 3 elements
$#someStuff = 0;                # @someStuff now is simply ("Hello")
$someStuff[1] = "Joe";          # Now @someStuff is ("Hello", "Joe")
$#someStuff  = -1;              # @someStuff is now empty
@someStuff   = ();              # does same thing as previous line