I've recently been debugging an old script. It predates our version control system. It predates our coding standards. It predates all our existing developers. As far as I can tell, it predates every tool we currently use, other than perl itself.

I've found some code that seems bizarre to me. There are a bunch of use constant declarations at the top, and they are used as array keys in some code that pretends to be object oriented, like so:

use constant PARENT => 0;
use constant PROGRESS => 1;

sub new
{
    my ($class) = @_;
    my $this = [];
    bless ($this, $class);
    
    $this->[PARENT] = undef;    
    $this->[PROGRESS] = 0;
    
    return $this;
}

[download]

To me, this looks like a dodgy cargo cult way of doing an ordered hash. But then I started wondering, what if it simply predates hashes? Can anyone shed any light on this? (before I remove all history of my interaction with this file...)

In reply to Is this ancient perl or just a cargo cult? by nevdka

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