I agree that it would be nice to have more level of control over autovivification. As tye suggests, sometimes only one level of autovivification is desired. Someone else might want at most two levels, such as when working with 2D arrays.

A debugger could be enhanced with an object that could provide this level of checking. This debugging object would contain a pointer to a variable whose autovivification is being monitored. Perl's debugger hooks could check autovivification constraints on a line-by-line basis at run-time. After the program starts working, the run-time checking could easily be turned off.

This is the sort of problem that I have trouble debugging with print statements, but I can easily debug with the ptkdb debugger. I just put the hash in the watch variable window and see how it grows. Or, if the data structure being monitored is too large, I put something like scalar(keys %myhash) in the watch window.

I've already been flamed each time that I have mentioned debuggers, so maybe we can skip that part this time!

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma

In reply to Re: non-autovivifing hash by toma
in thread non-autovivifing hash by bobdeath

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.