in reply to Re: Pop quiz: find the bug
in thread Pop quiz: find the bug

Perhaps I'm being dense, but I think [c]hromatic's solution is overkill.

If I were writing (or re-writing) the entire code snippet from scratch, I'd agree. The point of replacing the switch statement was twofold. First, I don't like switch statements. I find them generally unperlish. Second, I wanted to replace just that code, in a local refactoring. Since it was a bugfix, I didn't want to change a bunch of other variables.

That left me with the question, "How do I update the values of these variables based on identifying keys, while maintaining the variable names?" It was shorter than reassigning the variables from the hash values.

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Re: Re: Re: Pop quiz: find the bug
by jjohn (Beadle) on Jul 05, 2002 at 05:42 UTC

    It was shorter than reassigning the variables from the hash values.

    Ah! You have lifted the coins from my eyes. I didn't quite understand why you were using scalar refs. I believe your code assumes that the hash would be initialized like: 

    %totals = ( 'tcash' => \$tcash,
             ... 
          );

    [download]

    This is reasonable if the individual scalars must exist. It would be preferable to create hash that contains the appropriate values obtained directly from the canonical source, which I imagine is probably an SQL table. So perhaps I was over-thinking the solution by trying to imagine where those several scalars came from at all.

    Still, it isn't an unpleasant way to while away the hours. ;-)

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