use Perl

• And this is how to do it: (Score:2)

  by jdavidb (1361)

  $hash{hash} = {five => 5, six => 6, seven => 7};
@vals = @{$hash{hash}}{qw(five seven)};

  Note, don't make the mistake of

  @vals = $hash{hash}->{qw(five seven)};

  which parses correctly but does not give you what you're looking for.

  I don't think I'd even know about slices if it weren't for the warning you get with @array[$i].

  --
  J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
• Testing against implentations (Score:1)

  by Dom2 (2981)

  One of my beefs about perl is that it doesn't come with a good interactive environment (unlike python). I frequently test things against an implementation, just to see whether something works or not; I usually go to the documentation afterwords. :-)

  I must say though, that hash slices are one of those things that I nearly always avoid if possible; they're just too visually cluttered.
  • Re:Testing against implentations (Score:2)

    by jdavidb (1361)

    It's not a very good interactive environment, but you can use the debugger with a command like perl5.6.1 -de 1. I do it often, including yesterday when playing with slices.

    I haven't completely decided if I should avoid hash slices or not. I'll agree they seem cluttered. I'll have to wait until I'm maintaining this code three years from now to decide. :) For now I'm using them because they seem less cluttered than the alternative.

    --
    J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • Re:Testing against implentations (Score:1)

    by pudge (1)

    I don't understand what you mean. Yes, there is perl -d, as mentioned, and you can always use perl -e itself, too. But not knowing what you mean, I can't say if these are sufficient to your desires.
    
    Testing is sometimes a problem. For testing Slash, I wrote Slash::Test, which exports the four major objects, Dumper(), the entire API, all the constants, all the available plugin objects, etc. so I can do stuff like:

    % perl -MSlash::Test=useperl -e 'print Dumper $slashdb->getUserFoo($user->{uid})'

    Ever
  • Re:Testing against implentations (Score:1)

    by torin (519)

    There are a few different interactive environments out there including the perl -dead that folks have mentioned.
    For interactive exploration of complex structures, I've found Data::Walker [cpan.org] to be very useful.