As I outlined in 123089, I have some questions about scoping.

In college, we learned about 'static' variables. Alas, that was long enough ago that I dont recall whether it was pascal or C in which they were available.

At any rate, the gist of it was that I could expect something like this:

# warning, pseudocode
foo(4); # prints "4"
foo();  # prints "4"

sub foo {
  static int bar;
  bar = shift() unless defined bar;
  print bar;
}
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In the above, because foo received a value for bar, and bar was static, i could continue to use it after the sub had exited.

The reason for this is I would like a persistance of objects. Lets say that I do this:

sub too_slow {
  my $object = ReallyHuge::SlowObject -> new(%args);
  # do stuff with $object
  return "stuff";
}
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The problem is $object might take forever to create, or, even worse, it might have a socket connection in it (as is the case with MP3::Napster), and continually recreating it is not good. What I would like to do is this:

sub less_slow {
  my $object;
  $object = $dbh -> @{selectall_arrayref("select object from storage")
+}[0];
  if ($object -> exists()) {
    # behave normally
  }
  else {
    $object = ReallyHuge::SlowObject -> new(%args);
    $dbh -> do("update storage set object='$object'");
  }
}
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I realize that some trickery would have to be employed, like using storable or dumper to actually store the object rather than a direct reference to it.

This would allow me to call less_slow from within @children without losing connections, re-creating the object, et cetera.

thanks,
brother deprecated

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Laziness, Impatience, Hubris, and Generosity.