Cheerio,

I'm using Perl for financial data manipulations and am working with data which I do not want to keep longer than necessary in the program's memory.

To check how Perl behaves when I want it to forget the value of some variable I made a simple program that looked like this: 

  $a = 'charangaBoom'; $b = 'BANG!'; $c = $a . $b;
  $d = "D-$c"; substr($d, 2, 8) = 'x' x 8;
  sleep(600);

[download]

Then, I used 

  strings /dev/mem | egrep 'Boom[B][A][N][G]'

[download]
to check is there anywere "D-charangaBoomBANG" to be found. Unfortunatelly for me, there was.

Why is that? Is there any workaround to this except me writing another XS module providing me TIEd interface to forgettable variables?

In reply to making perl more forgetting by ddzeko

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