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    Ongoing observations by End Point Dev people

    Perl incompatibility moving to 5.10

    Ethan Rowe

    By Ethan Rowe
    July 28, 2008

    We’re preparing to upgrade from Perl 5.8.7 to 5.10.0 for a particular project, and ran into an interesting difference between the two versions.

    Consider the following statement for some hashref $attrib:

      use strict;
      ...
      my ($a, $b, $c) = @{%{$attrib}}{qw(a b c)};
    

    In 5.8.7, the @{…} construct will return a slice of the hash referenced by $attrib, meaning that $a gets $attrib->{a}, $b gets $attrib->{b}, and so on.

    In 5.10.0, the same construct will result in an error complaining about using a string for a hashref.

    I suspect it’s due to the hash dereference (%{$attrib}) being fully executed prior to applying the hash-slice operation (@{…}{qw(a b c)}), meaning that you’re not operating against a hashref anymore.

    Fortunately, the fix is wonderfully simple and significantly more readable:

      my ($a, $b, $c) = @$attrib{qw( a b c )};
    

    The “fix”—​which is arguably how it should have been constructed in the first place, but this is software we’re talking about—​works in both versions of Perl.

    perl


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