This has bothered me far more than it should. I quite often end up writing test code that looks like this:
{
my @log = ();
no warnings 'redefine';
*Some::Package::some_func = sub { push @log, [@_] };
sub get_log {
my @old_log = @log;
@log = ();
return @old_log;
}
}
# Then some tests that call subroutines that end up calling some_func.
The idea is to monkeypatch (Perl word of the week) the module I'm testing so I can make sure it calls some_func with the right arguments. For example with TextMate::JumpTo I wanted to test that it was going to invoke /usr/bin/open with the correct args - without actually going through with it and opening something. I didn't want the tests to spew a bunch of random windows into the user's text editor.
None of that is what bothers me. What I find troubling is that get_log is five lines of code just to read and reset the contents of a list. That's really quite upsetting, right?
Today I decided I could endure it no longer (I may be being a little theatrical here) so I spent some time thinking about it. Ideally I'd like to do away with the temporary variable altogether but I can't see a way to do that. Instead I've settled for this:
sub get_log { ( my @got, @log ) = @log }
It's not especially pretty but it's better. That temporary still bugs me though...
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