Perl Paradigm

[tradez]

Ok Monks, Try this on for size. I am working with code that in a nutshell has a part that looks like this:

while ($i < $entry){
 $i = $entry (2/3);
}

etc.... Whereas $i is being iterated earlier in the script. The part I don't get is the fact that my script will go through the iteration one last time when the $i var becomes equivalent to the $entry var. Hence when

 while(($i < $entry) && ($i ne $entry){
  $i = $entry(2/3);
}

is ran, i get the output I am looking for. Can you please help explain this perl paradigm to me?

Tradez
"Never underestimate the predicability of stupidity"
- Bullet Tooth Tony, Snatch (2001)

[dragonchild]

I'm not even sure what you're doing. There's a few issues with the snippets you posted:
1. In the while, you treat $entry as a number. Then, you treat it as a subroutine name. Do you have a bunch of subroutines named 1, 2, 3, etc?
2. Assuming you mean $i = $entry * (2 / 3);, the code will never end.
3. In the second snippet, you are doing a numeric check, then a string check. (< is numeric, ne is string.) While this will work (because both $i and $entry will be converted to strings and compared), it's better to do numeric checks if you're dealing with numbers.

I guess what I'm asking is - what on earth are you doing? What is $entry?

Oh - predicability has 2 't's in it. :-)

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

[Ovid]

I will confess that I am most confused. What you have is not valid syntax. Is there something you have left out of your code?

$ perl -MO=Deparse -e 'while ($i<$entry){$i = $entry (2/3)}'
syntax error at -e line 1, near "$entry ("
-e had compilation errors.
while ($i < $entry) {
    ;
}

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.
Silence is Evil (feel free to copy and distribute widely - note copyright text)

[dbp]

I think you must be mistaken. Maybe you should post the actual code.

Update:Is $i a number? I notice you are using ne in the second example which is for non-numeric data. Less-than will have interesting results if $i or $entry aren't numbers.