Ok, folks: I don't understand this. It must have something to do with anonymous arrays in Perl (no, it doesn't, I realize now), but I don't grok the connection. I ran into this in attempting a seemingly simple change in some customer's code; it wasn't hard to fix, but I simply do not understand why this happened.
Well, that's not precisely true: it happened because I went ahead in a hurry and added something "quick". It was just a new loop around some existing code. Ordinarily I would have written it like this:
@foo=qw(foo ba);
foreach $loopvar (@foo) {
..
But for some reason I did this instead:
foreach("foo","ba") {
$loopvar=$_;
..
Why? I don't know. Why did I grab brown pants this morning instead of blue? Who knows.
Anyway, that caused a strange error in a subroutine. I can duplicate it with simple test code:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# no problem here
caroomba("first");
@dayval=qw(foo ba);
foreach $dayval (@dayval) {
# no problem here
caroomba($dayval);
}
foreach $dayval ("foo2","ba2") {
# no problem here either
caroomba($dayval);
}
foreach ("foo3","ba3") {
# doesn't like this
$dayval=$_;
caroomba($dayval);
}
sub caroomba {
my $p=shift;
print "Caroomba called $p\n";
open(I,"./t");
while (<I>) {
# stuff..
}
close I;
}
When run, that produces:
Caroomba called first
Caroomba called foo
Caroomba called ba
Caroomba called foo2
Caroomba called ba2
Caroomba called foo3
Modification of a read-only value attempted at ./t.pl line 23, <I> line 23.
Why? Dude, werent you listening? I do not comprehend why. Some person with more brains than I currently have will have to explain that one to both of us.
Got something to add? Send me email.
More Articles by Anthony Lawrence © 2011-06-30 Anthony Lawrence
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. (Larry Niven)
Fri Sep 15 18:53:34 2006: 2461 TonyLawrence
I got some answers at (link)
but honestly they make no sense to me. That is, I understand *what* they are saying, but it isn't clear to me why it should work that way.
Sat Sep 16 15:15:45 2006: 2465 TonyLawrence
With a little more help from the newsgroups, I get it. I simply had misunderstood $_, not realizing that it is a package variable. That confusion came from it being localized in loops.
The Camel book actually tells you that the default variable for angle bracket input is the global $_ and not the local $_ (p.81 of the 3rd edition, otherwise look for the section on Line Input (Angle) Operator).
So that's what bit me.
Sat Dec 29 13:28:50 2007: 3355 TonyLawrence
In the just released 5.10 Perl , $_ can be made local:
(link)
If you have done "my $_", you can still get to the global $_ with "$::_," or "our $_".
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Perl loop causes strange read-only error Copyright © September 2006 Tony Lawrence
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