On Mon, 5 Aug 2002, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> At 1:30 PM +1000 8/6/02, Damian Conway wrote:
> >Luke Palmer asked:
> >
> >>Does:
> >>
> >> print %foo{bar}{baz};
> >>
> >>still create %foo{bar} as a hashref if it doesn't exist?
> >
> >It is my very strong hope that it will not.
>
> Unless Larry declares otherwise, it won't.
I bought up this question on 12/22/00, and it didn't get much response,
except for Graham Barr, who pointed out that there might be some trouble
with constructs like "func($x{1}{2}{3})" that may or may not need to
autovivify the argument if the function assigns to $_[0]. (This seems a
bit like the difficulty of implementing "hypothetical" values in regexes;
perhaps a similar solution could apply to both?)
Subsequent to that mini-discussion, I had occasion to talk to Larry in
person, and asked him about the autovivification behavior -- his response
was that he considered Perl 5's behavior of autovivifying read-only values
to be a misfeature, and that he hopes Perl 6 won't do so.
Now, since Larry, Dan and Damian all seem to be in agreement on this issue,
I sincerely hope Perl 6 will indeed break from Perl 5's misbehavior here...
However, will the "func($x{1}{2}{3})" case cause an implementation problem?
Deven
