[Omaha.pm] Pulling in a hash via "exec"...FAIL

[Jay Hannah]

Dan Linder wrote:
> The code I'm working on has had an unknown number of programmers over the
> last five years (most field engineers who hacked the code and submitted an
> enhancment, not necessiaraly any full-time programmers) so some of the code
> in it was probably put in and left there because it worked at the time and
> the permissiveness of Perl allowed for the abuse of variable type casting.
> :-)
>   

Damn you, perl. Why do you give us so much rope when we're hell bent on 
hanging ourselves?  :)

> Yes, wonderful additions - unfortunatly I know that Perl will not execute
> this piece of code due to failures the "use strict" finds so working through
> them is probably the best solution.  (And if not, I can always wrapper
> portions of code I can't fix with "no use strict"...sigh)
>   

Perhaps you can delete the stuff that use strict; bitches about? At 
least the scoping errors? Making the source a touch more readable? Care 
to post it on http://pastebin.com/ (or other) so we can see?

> Hmmm, this must be a pretty evil program by your measure - it uses eval
> quite a bit. :-)
>   

Yikes. IMHO anyone who uses eval is honor-bound to support that code for 
life. They are not allowed to quit that job, or die. Eval is fine when I 
write it, or when you wrote it AND support it, but it's evil incarnate 
when you write it and I have to support it...

> Storable looks like a good solution, but the saved files need to be human
> readable like the Data::Dump output - I searched for a flag in the Storable
> perldoc but couldn't find one.   (And I don't think that is the intention of
> Storable anyway - just provide the ability to store a MACHINE readable
> variable not HUMAN readable...)
>   

Ya. Agreed. So two files? The humans can read the dead-end .txt files if 
they want to, but the machine always restores the .storable file?

   store $fields, 'myfile.storable';
   open(OUT, ">myfile.txt");
   print OUT Data::Dumper->Dump( $fields );

Good luck! Sounds like a fun week!  :)

j