Yeah, I played around a little with factoring. You're right, I could have combined those.

But the inelegance was that there are two different reasons we could be updating the cache in the parent... one because we couldn't fork, and the other because the cache was so old we dared not show a stale cache. And I was trying to figure out how to have both of those fall out to the same place in the program without freaking out with state variables or contorted conditions, and just didn't get there.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker