Well, I'm beginning to repeat myself, so this will be my last attempt. The post from the start was a comment on how the standard sources of Perl documentation give short shrift to the issue of autovivification-related bugs, and that this is something that should be corrected (either that, or change the way Perl autovivifies to eliminate the most common of these bugs). The Perl documentation would be perfectly accurate, but much less useful, if it limited itself to describing how things work without ever mentioning pitfalls. You conveniently give the example of open: well, the Perl docs are rife with admonitions against failing to check the return value of open. There should be similar warnings about autovivification bugs. At the very least they deserve an entry in perltrap, and a pointer to this entry in perlref, and even also in perlreftut

the lowliest monk

In reply to Re^4: The Bad, the Ugly, and the Good of autovivification by tlm
in thread The Bad, the Ugly, and the Good of autovivification by tlm

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.