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Postings from December 2007
Mark Jason Dominus wrote:
> I have been thinking about this for a long time, and it has often
> seemed to me that "strict refs" was not as helpful as it could be.
I agree with the problem you've outlined, in theory, but I worry about one
thing...
> #1 and #3 could be solved by providing a trivial function,
> "ref2string", which explicitly converts a reference to a string
> without raising a fatal error. So instead of this:
>
> my $obj = Doggie->new(...);
> warn "Manufactured object '$obj'";
>
> one would have this:
>
> my $obj = Doggie->new(...);
> warn "Manufactured object '" . ref2string($obj) . "'";
I'm not sure I want to worry about mere interpolation throwing a run-time
error. Maybe a warning. Right now you have to work hard to get string
interpolation to blow up at run time.
I'm pretty sure I can come up with some legit cases where
$i_really_dont_care_if_this_is_a_reference_or_not is dropped into a string.
As I've learned, one easy way is to implement the stricture/warning and then
run it on some existing code. :)
Now instead of:
print "Blah blah $foo blah blah";
I need:
printf "Blah blah %s blah blah",
ref $foo ? ref2string($foo) : $foo;
Or I risk a run-time error.
And what if $obj has string overloading? Presumably that's safe, but now I
need more than a simple ref $obj check if I want to use J Random Scalar in a
string. I guess overload::StrVal() does what I mean.
use overload;
print "Blah blah @{[ overload::StrVal($foo) ]} blah blah";
Either way, its sand in the gears of Perl's implicit type conversions with
implications well beyond the simple foo("$ref") mistake.
--
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
-- Phillip K. Dick
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