Re^2: what would you like to see in perl5.12? (trees)

[Arunbear]

in reply to Re: what would you like to see in perl5.12? (trees)
in thread what would you like to see in perl5.12?

What should the 'seek' function do if you seek to a non existent key?

[tye]

'seek' doesn't care whether the key exists or not. It just arranges for the next use of each (actually, adding a way to reverse 'each' would be prudent as well) finds the earliest key greater than or equal to the key given to 'seek'. For convenience of interface, 'seek' might return something which might be different depending on whether the requested key exists or not, but those are details best left to the (unknown) implementor.

[Arunbear]

But say you have a hash like

%capital = (
    France  => 'Paris',
    England => 'London',
    Hungary => 'Budapest',
);

and you seek to 'Russia'. Should the next call to each behave as if all the elements had been read (i.e. return end-of-hash) ?

[tye]

Of course.