[Melbourne-pm] Postfix conditionals and creating lexicals

Damian Conway damian at conway.org
Sat Jul 14 06:14:45 PDT 2012


Sam Watkins  wrote:

>> is perfectly legal and does exactly what you'd expect.
>
> it's a perfectly useless extra clause

Sure. But if we're now warning about utility then we're going to
have to issue warnings for about 30% of everyone's code,
in my experience. ;-)


> an if that never fails is perfectly useless.

Hmmmmm. I can think of at least one perfectly valid use for it.


> If it fails, we get bogus behaviour

Which is already warned about in the most common case.
And which shouldn't be warned about in general because...

>> you can actually create a "selectably static" variable


> This could only happen with perl.

Really? I know (and have often taught) a few dozen different languages
and in my experience every one of them (including Python and Ruby) have
unresolved design or implementation issues just as long-standing and
just as egregious.


> If you illuminated perl hackers can't be bothered to fix it,

It isn't a case of "can't be bothered". It's a case of "it's already
documented and just not very important compared with the hundreds of
other serious bugs and implementation-suboptimalities in Perl, which we
don't have the time or resources to fix either, what with all of us having
real jobs, as well as the work we already do on Perl, for free, in our
own time."


> I will brave the jungle of perl internals and have a go (sacrificing
> my blissful ignorance of said jungle for the greater good).

Bravo! That's exactly the right spirit.


> Sam (do you have any more old OS X macs going cheap? :)

I'm afraid I'm down to old laptops now. If you have a worthwhile
use for a 5300c, let me know and I'll see if it still boots. ;-)

Damian


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