Advanced Perl Programming

Architecture

Figure 20.1 shows the various components of a running Perl system. Shaded rectangles represent data structures, some of which can have multiple instances in a program. The source code can also be partitioned roughly along these lines.

Figure 20-1. Snapshot of a running system

Perl Objects

The box “Perl object API” in Figure 20.1 represents the API to manipulate all internal data structures, such as variables, symbol tables, stacks, and resources such as files and sockets.

Variables

We saw in Chapter 3, that the term “variable” refers to a name-value pair. In this chapter, we will look at the API to manipulate the different types of values and to optionally bind them to names. A value can be one of the following:

SV: Scalar value

AV: Array value

HV: Hash value

CV: Code value

GV: Glob value (or typeglob)

RV: Reference value

An SV can further be classified as an IV (integer value), PV (string value), or NV (double). The abbreviations are part of a uniform naming convention, so you can easily guess the intent of a function named newSViv, for example.

These value types provide a simple API, resize themselves automatically, and follow simple memory management protocols. For this reason, most Perl internal data structures such as stacks and symbol tables are also implemented in terms of these values.

Symbol tables

Symbol tables are plain old HVs, whose keys are identifier names ...