P is for Practical | |
PerlMonks |
Re^2: Function Prototype Context Conversionby tadman (Prior) |
on Jun 13, 2002 at 13:02 UTC ( [id://174178]=note: print w/replies, xml ) | Need Help?? |
Well, it is clear the way Perl operates, but that is merely one interpretation of how it could be done. What burned me was that I do this sort of thing all the time with regular, unprototyped functions. It just goes to show you never can be too careful when programming.
I suppose the unfortunate thing is that Perl doesn't differentiate between "scalars" and scalar-like things in the same way that it differentiates between "arrays" and lists. Using prototypes to merely mandate how many paramters should be passed to a function doesn't seem to be the best way to go about it anyway. Maybe I'm too shell oriented, where I expect things to be automatically expanded before being processed. Meaning, something like this: % /bin/foo foo_a foo_b foo_cWhere there you have three distinct parameters being passed to /bin/foo and it will complain if it doesn't have, let's say, at least two. % /bin/foo foo_?Now here there's technically one element being passed to the shell, which expands it into a list before being proccesed. Same thing goes if you had a variable $FOO which was 'foo_a foo_b foo_c' of course. In summary, I suppose the only way to do this reliably is something like this: But you're not likely to see that put into general practice any time soon. I understand that Perl and the shell are two different things, so this whole thing is really just one big assumption that I made. The only reason I would even think of Perl functions and command-line programs as the same thing is the whole laissez-faire way of handling arguments that Perl has. They're not typed (normally), they're not named, heck, they're not even declared unless you use prototypes! In that regard, I was figuring that @_ would operate along the same lines as @ARGV since the two are so alike in that respect.
In Section
Seekers of Perl Wisdom
|
|