Re^2: Perl oddities

Update: Nonsense below, I misread the post.

It would be much more useful, or sensible, if hash in a scalar context returned the number of keys:

As soon as you try to use it as a number, "2/8" will be numified to 2 so actually it does effectively return the number keys.

perl -le '%h = (a =>1, b => 2); print %h+0'
2
[download]

The number of buckets is some bonus info for free.

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Re^3: Perl oddities by jmcnamara (Monsignor) on Mar 01, 2005 at 16:26 UTC
In the above case yes but as the number of keys is increased the buckets will get reused and the result won't be correct: `$ perl -le '%h = (1 .. 10); print scalar %h' 5/8 $ perl -le '%h = (1 .. 12); print scalar %h' 5/8 $ perl -le '%h = (1 .. 100); print scalar %h' 33/64` [download] `:-)` Actually, I searched for a genuine use for this feature for a long time and I almost found one: Power Twool. -- John.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Perl oddities by fergal (Chaplain) on Mar 01, 2005 at 18:19 UTC
Oops. I completely misread your original post. I thought it was elements/buckets, not used/total. That said, given Perl's non-object data model, the only other way to provide this info would be through yet another function.	[reply]

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