What is avoiding unnecessary copying in Perl?

Avoiding unnecessary copying in Perl is a performance optimization technique that helps to minimize memory usage and speed up execution by manipulating references instead of duplicating data. This is especially important in large data structures or when performing operations on large strings or arrays.

Here's an example demonstrating how to work with references to avoid copying:

# Create an array my @original_array = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5); # Create a reference to the original array my $array_ref = \@original_array; # Modify the array using its reference push @$array_ref, 6; # Print the original array to see the changes print "@original_array"; # Output: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Perl memory optimization references performance array data structures