SPUG: Something to loose sleep over

[Lauren Smith]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Waring [mailto:dwaring at nwsr.com]
> 
> Warning this is a demonstration of a bug that only appears in certain 
> installations of Perl. It is a weird bug and I am really pointing it 
> out as a topic of conversation. Ignore this if you are not interested 
> in really yucky stuff.

> # call a subroutine several times with different parameters

I took the liberty of initializing @A, @D, and @X thusly:
@a = ('a');
@d = ('d');
@x = ('x');

> 
> asubroutine(\@A,"B","C");
> asubroutine(\@D,"E","F");
> asubroutine(\@X,"Y","Z");
> 
> sub asubroutine{
> 	print @_,\n";
> 	$x= shift @_;
> 	$y= shift @_;
> 	$z= shift @_;
> }
> 
> RESULTS
> ABC
> ABC
> ABC
> 

Why would the first element of @_ be a character?  Does AIX pull the value
directly out of 'ARRAY(0xca7408)'?
> 
> Now we can fix this in several ways. All of the following changes 
> behaved properly an had the expected results of
> ABC
> DEF
> XYZ

I'm not even sure that that would be the expected results, though.

ARRAY(0xca7408)bc
ARRAY(0xca7480)ef
ARRAY(0xca74f8)hi

These are the results that I got (NT 4, SP6).

> We will be reinstalling Perl on this box but does anyone have any 
> idea what in the deepest bowels of Perl could be going on here????

I wish I knew, it looks really hairy.

Good luck!

Lauren
(New to the group.  Hi group!)

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