Well I dont really think Schwern was thinking about people who might need the stringified version of the array, but rather for situations where having a real array would be a waste of space. I dont think you can argue that his implementation is buggy, it just doesn't do something that you think it should. (And frankly that I think it should too :-)

Anyway, I think your patch would be undesirable as it would cause all code using Tie::VecArray to break as they would be passing in non refs. But changing the TIEARRAY method resolves that problem.

sub TIEARRAY {
    my $class=shift;
    my $bits =shift;
    no strict 'refs';
    my $self = bless [\%{$class.'::FIELDS'}], $class;

    $self->{bits} = $bits;
    if (@_ and eval { $_[0]=$_[0]; 1} ) {
        $self->{vec}  =    \$_[0];
    } else {
        my $vec=@_ ? $_[0] : "";
        $self->{vec}  =    \$vec;
    }
    $self->{size} = _BYTES2IDX($self, length ${$self->{vec}});

    return $self;
}
[download]

However on second thought that may be a problem as it could have disasterous results on code not expecting alias semantics on $vec, but rather the original copy semantics. So a variant to your approach would do nicely:

sub TIEARRAY {
    my($class, $bits, $vec) = @_;
    no strict 'refs';
    my $self = bless [\%{$class.'::FIELDS'}], $class;
    
    $self->{bits} = $bits;
    $self->{vec}  = ref $vec ? $vec : \$vec;
    $self->{size} = _BYTES2IDX($self, length ${$self->{vec}});

    return $self;
}
[download]

Now you would have both semantics. If you pass a ref its expected to a be a reference to a writeable scalar, if you dont then the value is copied. This would be a patch that shouldnt break anything that already exists, and adds useful functionality.

Which brings me to a different point. Instead of just writing a medition about how your version is better, why not work out a patch that shouldnt break existing code, but provides your desired behaviour and then give it to the author for the next release? Hint, hint. :-)

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.