Well, technically, that's exactly what needs to be fixed, but it'd be hard to fix it. The dereferencing operator at the tail end knows if it's in an lvalue (being assigned to) or rvalue (being accessed) context, but apparently, the information is not available to the dereferencing operators in the middle of the chain, and that'd be messy to add. Apparently, it requires adding a new bytecode to Perl, and that has a lot of potential for breaking many more things than it fixes.
For now, the known workaround is to step carefully down the tree, calling exists at each level before proceeding to the next. In practice, I've not been bitten by this, but maybe it's because I had been bitten once or twice while practicing with references. {grin}
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|