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Updated: Wednesday, July 27, 2022
 
 

Internals (3)

Name

Internals - Reserved special namespace for internals related functions

Synopsis

$is_ro= Internals::SvREADONLY($x)
$refcnt= Internals::SvREFCNT($x)
hv_clear_placeholders(%hash);

Description

Perl Programmers Reference Guide                                  Internals(3)



NAME
       Internals - Reserved special namespace for internals related functions

SYNOPSIS
           $is_ro= Internals::SvREADONLY($x)
           $refcnt= Internals::SvREFCNT($x)
           hv_clear_placeholders(%hash);

DESCRIPTION
       The Internals namespace is used by the core Perl development team to
       expose certain low level internals routines for testing and other
       purposes.

       In theory these routines were not and are not intended to be used
       outside of the perl core, and are subject to change and removal at any
       time.

       In practice people have come to depend on these over the years, despite
       being historically undocumented, so we will provide some level of
       forward compatibility for some time. Nevertheless you can assume that
       any routine documented here is experimental or deprecated and you
       should find alternatives to their use.

   FUNCTIONS
       SvREFCNT(THING [, $value])
           Historically Perl has been a refcounted language. This means that
           each variable tracks how many things reference it, and when the
           variable is no longer referenced it will automatically free itself.
           In theory Perl code should not have to care about this, and in a
           future version Perl might change to some other strategy, although
           in practice this is unlikely.

           This function allows one to violate the abstraction of variables
           and get or set the refcount of a variable, and in generally is
           really only useful in code that is testing refcount behavior.

           *NOTE* You are strongly discouraged from using this function in
           non-test code and especially discouraged from using the set form of
           this function.  The results of doing so may result in segmentation
           faults or other undefined behavior.

       SvREADONLY(THING, [, $value])
           Set or get whether a variable is readonly or not. Exactly what the
           readonly flag means depend on the type of the variable affected and
           the version of perl used.

           You are strongly discouraged from using this function directly. It
           is used by various core modules, like "Hash::Util", and the
           "constant" pragma to implement higher-level behavior which should
           be used instead.

           See the core implementation for the exact meaning of the readonly
           flag for each internal variable type.

       hv_clear_placeholders(%hash)
           Clear any placeholders from a locked hash. Should not be used
           directly.  You should use the wrapper functions provided by
           Hash::Util instead.  As of 5.25 also available as "
           Hash::Util::_clear_placeholders(%hash) "

AUTHOR
       Perl core development team.


ATTRIBUTES
       See attributes(7) for descriptions of the following attributes:


       +---------------+-----------------------+
       |ATTRIBUTE TYPE |   ATTRIBUTE VALUE     |
       +---------------+-----------------------+
       |Availability   | runtime/perl-532      |
       +---------------+-----------------------+
       |Stability      | Pass-through volatile |
       +---------------+-----------------------+

SEE ALSO
       perlguts Hash::Util constant universal.c



NOTES
       Source code for open source software components in Oracle Solaris can
       be found at https://www.oracle.com/downloads/opensource/solaris-source-
       code-downloads.html.

       This software was built from source available at
       https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland.  The original community
       source was downloaded from
       http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.32.0.tar.gz.

       Further information about this software can be found on the open source
       community website at https://www.perl.org/.



perl v5.32.0                      2020-06-14                      Internals(3)