use Perl

• Ouch. Head hurt. Need beer. (Score:2)

  by Ovid (2709)

  Can you give an example of how this might make some code cleaner or more correct?
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Aristotle (5147)

    I had to chuckle at your subject. I certainly know the feeling. The upshot is that you can use this to write recursive anonymous closures (avoiding all side-effects).

    I did this as an excercise. I am tiptoeing into the functional world proper lately, but my stance to it remains ambivalent. Perl isn’t quite the most beautiful language, but I find it a whoooole lot easier to read than any Lisp. I doubt that will ever change, irrespective of practice – I find your lack of syntax disturbing. This
    • Re:Ouch. Head hurt. Need beer. (Score:1)

      by nothingmuch (5848) on 2006.09.05 16:13 (#49832) Homepage Journal

      Not precisely... Weaken works on the variable, not the value. This should work:

      my $f;
      $f = sub { ... $f ... };
      weaken $f;
      return $f;

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      • Re: (Score:1)

        by runrig (3385)

        That doesn't work. As soon as you weaken $f, the code it refers to goes away because there are no other references to it. You need to keep another reference to it (hence the temp variable in a previous reply).