Re: [ALACPP] How Perl sucks even worse than C++ when it comes to assoc arrays

[Kevin Scaldeferri <kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Christopher Smith wrote:

> Of course, I thought to myself, this problem can all be solved nicely
> using a language where assoc arrays are built in to the language. This
> made me think of Perl. In Perl doing:
>
> $foo{'bar'};
>
> does not create an entry in %foo with a key of 'bar'. However:
>
> $foo{'bar'} = 'baz';
>
> will. All magical and wonderful right? Well, I discovered this one the
> other day:
>
> if (defined($foo{'bar'}->{'baz'})) {
> #some stuff
> }
>
>  
...


Autovivification really is your friend 99% of the time.  Experienced 
Perl hackers know to write

if (exists($foo{'bar'})  && defined($foo{'bar'}->{'baz'}) ) {
...
}

Of course, if you're typo prone, this might not help you and you might 
want to look into pseudohashes (get 'em while you still can!).  Or you 
could go OO.

Supposedly in the grand future of Perl 6, autovivification will be 
controllable via a pragma.


Kevin

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