Re: exists $foo[7] and delete $foo[7]

[Alan Burlison <Alan.Burlison@uk.sun.com>]

Joshua N Pritikin wrote:
 
> Speaking for weirdness, is anyone else concerned with the autovivication
> of intermediate steps of exists()?  My expectation has always been that
> exists() does not autovivify.  Once the behavior is documented, then it
> will be more difficult to fix later.

Yes, I'm concerned.  I'd actually class the current behaviour as a bug. 
I wasted nearly a day because of this on the first big perl program I
wrote.  I use nested hashes quite often, and having to explicitly test
all the way down the tree to avoid autoconfustication is a right royal
pain,  i.e.

if (! exists($h->{$a}) || ! exists($h->{$a}{$b}) || !
exists($h->{$a}{$b}{$c}))

instead of the much more obvious

if (! exists($h->{$a}{$b}{$c}))

Alan Burlison

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Follow-Ups from:

Gurusamy Sarathy <gsar@ActiveState.com>

References to:

london@pixelmagic.com
Larry Wall <larry@wall.org>
Joshua N Pritikin <joshua.pritikin@db.com>

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