The treetops of a bad neighbourhood

rafael on 2003-02-13T12:39:11

Have I already mentioned here how much I dislike pseudo-hashes ? From perlref (5.8.0), we read : you may use an array reference in some contexts that would normally require a hash reference. That means that if you have mistakenly used an array ref where a hash ref was expected, (especially in the middle of a large and complex data structure, that's funnier), this may silently go very wrong (as perl doesn't even warn you that you're using a pseudo-hash). In my case, this meant two hours hunting down a Out of memory! / Callback called exit error.

(I think Jarkko added a deprecation warning for pseudo-hashes in 5.8.1-to-be, but I'm not sure.)

-- Title of this journal entry by David King (Happy Apple)

yes, indeed

jhi on 2003-02-13T14:12:40

kosh:/tmp/jhi/maint ; /p/bin/perl -wle '$a=[{foo=>1,bar=>2},"FOO","BAR"];print $a->{foo}'
FOO
kosh:/tmp/jhi/maint ; ./perl -wle '$a=[{foo=>1,bar=>2},"FOO","BAR"];print $a->{foo}'
Pseudo-hashes are deprecated at -e line 1.
FOO
kosh:/tmp/jhi/maint ;

It's the dereferencing of pseudo-hashes that triggers the warning.

Our long national nightmare is over.

schwern on 2003-02-14T05:41:32