in reply to Mini-rant about 'strict'

I've been bitten by that a couple times before. One work-around is to say: 
my %hash;
BEGIN { %hash = (...); }

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It'd be nice to be able to say that all at once, like: my %hash = BEGIN { (...) }; as merlyn has asked about to the P5P.
_____________________________________________________
Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart

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Re^2: Mini-rant about 'strict'
by Ovid (Cardinal) on Aug 04, 2004 at 20:43 UTC

    I know that BEGIN is not really a sub but it's kind of a sub ... I wonder why that doesn't work? Is it some sort of weird timing issue?

    Cheers,
    Ovid

    New address of my CGI Course.

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      It's not even a kind of sub. It's not anything like a sub at all. You can't manually call the code found in a BEGIN block, can't take a reference to it, or anything else you can do with a sub. The fact that you're allowed to write sub BEGIN is just syntactic sugar — badly misguided syntactic sugar.

      Makeshifts last the longest.

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        Eh. People probably shouldn't do this anyway but it is possible.

        use B;
BEGIN { B::save_BEGINs() }
BEGIN { "Boo!" }
print $_->object_2svref->() for B::begin_av->ARRAY;
# Corrected by adding ->ARRAY. I forgot that begin_av does not return
# a list, it returns a [cpan://B]::AV object which must have ->ARRAY
# called on it to get the contents.

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[d/l]

        You can return from it. Modifications to @_ inside a BEGIN block disappear after leaving the BEGIN block. Also, (caller(0))[3] returns "main::BEGIN" inside BEGIN blocks. 

            # Prints nothing
    BEGIN { @_ = 1 }
    print @_;


    # Prints 1
    BEGIN {
        print 1;
        return;
        print 2;
    }


    # Prints main::BEGIN
    BEGIN { print +(caller(0))[3] }


    # (Un)expectedly, this won't recurse
    BEGIN { &BEGIN }

        [download]
        I'd say it behaves quite a bit like a subroutine, albeit not completely.

        ihb

        Read argumentation in its context!

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