in reply to •Re: Re: •Re: sub and anonymous sub
in thread sub and anonymous sub

But local also works with lexical variables, doesn't it? IMHO, I didn't think it was necessary for $my_sub_level to be a global, per se. Since perl 5.6 it's been possible to localize nearly any variable; I've localized member variables of class instances, lexicals, arbitrary scalars within complex multi-level structures (hash containing arrayrefs of hashrefs containing hashrefs, etc.).

Granted, localizing such a thing may (temporarily, subject to the enclosing scope) hide the thing being localized with what is effectively a global, but that's an internal implementation detail that seems to have mattered not, at least with the code in which I've used it.

To return to the original question, isn't $depth referred to as a closure? Or (perhaps my semantics are incorrect) is sub recurse the closure? Semantics aside, I'm surprised no one mentioned the word.

dmm

If you GIVE a man a fish you feed him for a day
But, TEACH him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime

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Re: Re: •Re: Re: •Re: sub and anonymous sub
by thelenm (Vicar) on Jun 21, 2002 at 22:08 UTC
    Since local works with variables in the symbol table and lexical (my) variables have no symbol table entries, you can't use local on a my variable. For example, this fails: 
    perl -e 'my $foo; local $foo'

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    with the error: 
    Can't localize lexical variable $foo at -e line 1.

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    -- Mike

    --
    just,my${.02}

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      Hmmm, I seem to recall localizing a hash value within a deeply nested structure, like: 

      my $root = { some_object => obj };
$root->{some_object} = new Object;
my $arrayref = $root->{some_object}->objectMethodReturningEmbeddedArra
+yref();
$arrayref->[0] = 5;
{
  local $arrayref->[0] = 0;
  # execute some code, which sees 0 not 5
}

# now array element is 5 again

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      I specifically remember wanting to do something like that in 5.004 and not being able to, having instead to do something like this: 

      # ...
$arrayref->[0] = 5;
# ...
{
  my $lcl = $arrayref->[0];
  $arrayref->[0] = 0;

  # execute some code, which sees 0 not 5

  $arrayref->[0] = $lcl;
}

# now array element is 5 again

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      dmm

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