Yet another stupid mistake #3: local is not that magical

By Steven Haryanto on

One of my favorite things in Perl is of course local variables, a.k.a. dynamic scoping. After learning that you can localize just a hash pair, or an array element, I have often used local() as sort of a stack to save temporary results. Then a few weeks ago I was hit with a bug:

{
    local $ary->[-1] = $foo;
    manipulate_ary($ary);
}

which is okay, until I got carried away and shift(), pop(), splice(), et al on @$ary in manipulate_ary(), and expected local() to take care of everything. Of course it's not that magical.

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About Steven Haryanto

user-pic A programmer (mostly Perl 5 nowadays). My CPAN ID: SHARYANTO. I'm sedusedan on perlmonks. My twitter is stevenharyanto (but I don't tweet much). Follow me on github: sharyanto.

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