Task — Locate memory

Write a script to declare a variable or constant and print it’s location in memory.

Examples

No examples were supplied.

Analysis

I presume that what is required is the hexadecimal number which is generated if I print a reference, for example say \$x. That prints, for example SCALAR(0x1278260), and one could reasonably assume that the hex value printed is an offset (in bytes) from some datum to the place where $x is currenly stored.

The datum is almost certainly not byte 0 of the computer's memory, so the address printed is not an absolute address. Linux has a - rather opaque - memory management layer that will have allocated one or more blocks of memory to me, and within that, my instance of Perl has a subset of that, and Perl itself will have a block of memory allocated to variables. The address printed could be relative to the start of any of these.

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Blog: http://ccgi.campbellsmiths.force9.co.uk/challenge

use v5.26;    # The Weekly Challenge - 2021-04-12
use utf8;     # Week 108 - task 1 - Locate memory
use warnings; # Peter Campbell Smith
binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';
use Encode;


locate_memory();

sub locate_memory {
    
    my ($x);
    
    \$x =~ m|\((.*)\)|; 
    say qq[\nOutput: Address of \$x is: $1];
    
    \2 =~ m|\((.*)\)|;
    say qq[        Address of  2 is: $1
    
    These are probably addresses relative to the start 
    of the block of memory that Linux and Perl have
    used to store variables and constants.];
}

9 lines of code

I completed this challenge after the closing date
and it has not been submitted to GitHub

Output

Output: Address of $x is: 0xf8d338
        Address of  2 is: 0xff1bf8
		
        These are probably addresses relative to the start
        of the block of memory that Linux and Perl have
        used to store variables and constants.