All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
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Ovid (2709)
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Stuff with the Perl Foundation. A couple of patches in the Perl core. A few CPAN modules. That about sums it up.
Halting problem in Perl
Microsoft has a program called Terminator that basically tries to solve the halting problem. They claim it's helped them root out some bugs in their device drivers. Of course, we know the halting problem is unsolveable, but we also know that Microsoft engineers aren't stupid. So what are they doing? Well, some types of halting problems can be detected and highlighted and even if you don't find all bugs, even automatically finding some bugs is better than finding none.
Though they'll be releasing papers explaining this, I'm not sure how applicable it will be in Perl. Here's a typical example in C:
float x = 0.1;
while (x != 1.1) {
x = x + 0.1;
printf("x = %f\n", x);
}
If you translated that to Perl, would it be an infinite loop? There's actually no way to tell just by looking directly at the code:
my $x = 0.1;
while ($x != 1.1) {
$x +=.1;
print "x = $x\n";
}
Well, that certainly looks like an infinite loop. Why might it not be? Because the following might not be an infinite loop:
print $foo while 1;
We're not even talking source filters here.
#!/usr/bin/perl -l
use strict;
use warnings;
{
package Arnie;
use overload '""' => \&to_string;
sub new { bless {}, shift }
my $x = 1;
sub to_string {
die if 5 == $x;
return $x++;
}
}
my $sarah = Arnie->new;
print $sarah while 1;
I suspect this is one of many types of problems which would make such an approach difficult to use for Perl.
I pour myself a cup of strong coffee. :-)
-- Jarkko Hietaniemi
Action at a distance (Score:2)
Re:Action at a distance (Score:2)
-Dom
That would still be useful in perl (Score:2)
In production code where I'd want to use something like this I work to minimise such edge cases (which simplifies maintainence and debugging), and would rather have to look through false alarms and check them than not have any help with a halting bug or infinite loop.
@JAPH = qw(Hacker Perl Another Just);
print reverse @JAPH;