From waldo at cos.com  Fri Mar 16 08:52:28 2001
From: waldo at cos.com (David Waldo)
Date: Wed Aug  4 23:57:28 2004
Subject: perl + firearms + highschool student = trouble
Message-ID: <FE34177B7AAAD41193C10002A51309CD0EA79F@ntmailer.cos.com>

>From perl.com, beware of mistaken scalar context assignments ...


The big buzz in Perl today is a Slashdot post to the effect that a
couple of high school sophmores attracted the attention of their
school administrators, and eventually even the police, all thanks to
a little confusion over the difference between scalar and list
contexts in perl.

    # Scalar context assignment: Store the entire output of the well-known
    #     UNIX fortune(1) program.

    my $f   = `fortune`;

    ... is not the same as ...

    # List context assignment, with one element on the left side: Store
    #    *just the first line* of the output of fortune(1).

    my ($f) = `fortune`;

Apparently, the lad in question used the latter code to generate
random quotes on his webpage, rather than the former scala context
code, which is probably what he wanted. When school administrators
viewed the site, they got a page containing, among other things,
just the first line of a William Gibson quote mentioning smuggling
firearms, totally out of context and without attribution. The rest
of the story isn't hard to imagine, but you can read all about it at:

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/13/208259

The article concludes by quoting from the Camel 3: "You will be
miserable until you learn the difference between scalar and list
context." Yeah, no kidding.
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From waldo at cos.com  Fri Mar 16 09:15:11 2001
From: waldo at cos.com (David Waldo)
Date: Wed Aug  4 23:57:28 2004
Subject: O'Really Online Catalog
Message-ID: <FE34177B7AAAD41193C10002A51309CD0EA7A0@ntmailer.cos.com>

Take a very close look at this web site:

	http://bofhcam.org/co-larters/index.html

I especially like:

	http://bofhcam.org/co-larters/user-obliteration/index.html
	http://bofhcam.org/co-larters/distributing-clue/index.html
	http://bofhcam.org/co-larters/why-you-cant/index.html

And the really good news: T-shirts too!!!

	http://www.copyleft.net/search.phtml?search=1&lookup[brand_id]=55
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From bsimon at stsci.edu  Fri Mar 16 12:13:17 2001
From: bsimon at stsci.edu (Bernie Simon)
Date: Wed Aug  4 23:57:28 2004
Subject: O'Really Online Catalog
In-Reply-To: <FE34177B7AAAD41193C10002A51309CD0EA7A0@ntmailer.cos.com>
References: <FE34177B7AAAD41193C10002A51309CD0EA7A0@ntmailer.cos.com>
Message-ID: <15026.22284.774694.115488@valis.stsci.edu>

David Waldo writes:
 > Take a very close look at this web site:
 > 
 > 	http://bofhcam.org/co-larters/index.html

They've also got a funny 404 error page. Try leaving off the last 'l'
on the URL.

-- 
Bernie Simon