http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1003122


in reply to Re^5: Moo and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
in thread Moo and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel

Great! But how strange. local $_ also fails. It would be very interesting to hear why this fails.

Update: Ergo better omit $_ in general?

Thank you very much for your help and best regards,

Karl

«The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^7: Moo and Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
by tobyink (Canon) on Nov 09, 2012 at 13:32 UTC

    my $_ should work, but local $_ would fail.

    It's because the loop variable in a for loop is an alias to each element of the array. So the global $_ is an alias into @roles in this case. Assigning to global $_ assigns into the @roles array. local (despite the name) operates on global variables, providing a local value for them, but not really creating a new local variable. So even in the scope of local $_ assigning to $_ will assign into @roles.

    It's a particular combination of Perl features which is normally fairly safe to use, but because apply_roles_to_package also happens to load modules (and thus run third-party code - i.e. code which is not part of Moo) it causes problems.

    perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'

      Could you try explaining this again? In particular, what is the code outside of Moo that causes $_ to exhibit this problem? It probably doesn't help that I'm not clear on how 'undef' ends up in @roles (is the code that does that shown anywhere in this thread?). I'm also unclear how the 'uninitialized' warning causes the Role::Tiny module to fail (leading to a "Compilation failed") without producing an error message.

      Thank you (in advance).

      - tye        

        "Could you try explaining this again? In particular, what is the code outside of Moo that causes $_ to exhibit this problem? It probably doesn't help that I'm not clear on how 'undef' ends up in @roles (is the code that does that shown anywhere in this thread?)."

        Moo::Role loops through the list of roles with a for loop, using the default loop variable, global $_. (Or rather it did, as this is now fixed.)

        In for loops, the loop variable is an alias into the array. If you assign to it, the original array is altered. Thus within that loop, if $_ were assigned to, it would alter the list of roles.

        Now, what happens within the loop? The role modules get required. And thus any modules that the role modules use get loaded too. And in all that code that gets loaded, somewhere, undef gets assigned to global $_. (And no, I don't know exactly where... Spreadsheet::WriteExcel has a number of dependencies.)

        That's how undef gets into @roles.

        "I'm also unclear how the 'uninitialized' warning causes the Role::Tiny module to fail (leading to a "Compilation failed") without producing an error message."

        Role::Tiny has:

        use warnings FATAL => 'all';
        perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'