Re: Re: Why Doesn't each() DWIM?

[enoch]

Yea.

I am just wondering if there is a reason Perl won't do it for me? Why isn't there a little Do What I Mean in there.

Is there a technical reason why that piece of DWIMmery would be considered harmful at some edge case?

[duff]

Perl already does what I mean in this case. If it did what you wanted, my expectations would be violated. Also, let's say that at the end of a loop the iterator on each() was reset, how would you get the behavior where it wasn't reset when you need it?

[enoch]

how would you get the behavior where it wasn't reset when you need it?

++

Good point

[jepri]

Is there a technical reason why that piece of DWIMmery would be considered harmful at some edge case?

I can think of one. Whether it is right or not is another matter :)

There would be times when you wanted to return to your position in the hash. If the iterator (or hashkey pointer) was reset everytime the program left a control loop, you would have to save it in a variable and then restore it each time you went into another control structure.

I don't see this as being a bad thing - other languages do it like this. I also don't know why it wasn't done this way rather than the way it currently is.

Having said that, I have found this to be a problem before, but some careful data structure design worked around it just fine.