Swapping Things
So we all know
the COMPSCI 101 method of swapping two variables:
$tmp = $x; $x =
$y; $y = $tmp;
And we all know the better way of doing it:
($x, $y) = ($y,
$x);
And yet, I
found the following in PRODUCTION CODE, that a contractor was PAID ACTUAL DOLLARS TO WRITE:
($tmp_x, $tmp_y)
= ($x, $y);
($x, $y) = ($tmp_y, $tmp_x);
Weird that
they knew about parallel assignment but not that you could just apply it to two
variables directly.
Anyhow, this
wasn’t nearly as bad as the code I found in a different module (same vendor) to
swap all the 1s and 0s in a string. Now this is a somewhat less trivial
problem than simply swapping two variables, but
$str
=~ tr/01/10/;
does the job nicely. Alas, in the same vein as the variable-swap, the method
that vendor went with was:
$str =~ s/0/2/g;
$str =~ s/1/3/g;
$str =~ s/2/1/g;
$str =~ s/3/0/g;
My real name is Jeremy Holland. I've been a programmer for 25 years, using primarily Perl since 2000.
Why don't you use the normal
<pre><code class="prettyprint">formatting of code?Because this user’s posts are all written in (or possibly pasted into) the rich text editor, not as HTML or Markdown.
The
class="prettyprint"bit is not even necessary to add, btw. That gets inserted by the syntax highlighter automatically.You guessed it. I have found that it is much easier to create a post externally and copy it into the RTF editor. It turns out that Movable Type and I are only marginally compatible.