http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=80623


in reply to Re: Segfaulty
in thread Segfaulty

I'd like to expand a bit on tye's remarks. He's right, but the reasons he's right could be a little clearer. Basically, yes, MeowChow's code is "asking for it". That's probably because he's taken a larger script (such as this, perhaps) and reduced it to the bare minimum required to cause a segfault. In a large, complicated script, it could be quite easy to have something equivalent to those lines scattered about, here and there. It would be very difficult to track that kind of bug down (especially since bad() might work fine for any arguments except @h), so we'd rather have perl just execute it correctly. The point of having garbage collection in a language like perl is that it's supposed to save us the trouble of worrying about whether we've deallocated a particular piece of memory or not.