Is this a bug in Perl (nested hash)?

[Chris Radcliff]

~sdpm~


"John R. Comeau" wrote:
> Checking for the existence of a nested key like $hash{key0}{key00}
> causes $hash{key0} to exist.  Is that the way it's supposed to work?
> I would think that merely checking for the existence of
> $hash{key0}{key00} would not cause $hash{key0} to exist.
> 

I ran this program and got:
KEYS 
key0 
key1

... which is what I would expect. Why is this unexpected? At no time did
($hash{key1}) return true, for instance, and neither will (exists
$hash{key1}). You get key0 and key1 in the keys result because you
inherently dereferenced them to get to key00 and key10.

I haven't tried it with warnings turned on, but I have the sinking
suspicion that Perl will yell about using an uninitialized value because
you're dereferencing a variable that doesn't contain a reference. Anyone
willing to try?

~chris
~sdpm~

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