in reply to Tk: exit main(@ARGV); fails

It looks to me like you're declaring main after you use it. Since you're not doing &main, and main isn't defined yet, Perl might be stringifying it, thus generating the error you see.

Try using an &, or declare main before you use it.

Update: After verifying that what I was saying above didn't make 100% sense (as I tested what you were doing with my own arbitrarily named functions and it worked), I've been looking at the source for the Tk stuff for a while and have been unable to locate where this function is even defined! The only reference to it is in TkXSUBS.def, but it's commented out in the source I downloaded. I can't find any reference to Tk::exit or 'exit' in an .xs file anywhere. Goofy, but I don't claim to be an XS expert.

Just use Tk (); or explicitely name what you want exported. That should leave Tk::exit in Tk's namespace.

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(tye)Re: Tk: exit main(@ARGV); fails
by tye (Sage) on Nov 09, 2000 at 01:55 UTC

    Thanks for the nudge in the right direction. The crux of the problem is that the imported exit() does not have a prototype and overrides the built-in exit() which has a prototype of ($) [takes exactly one scalar argument].

    I'm really starting to wish for a 

    use strict "object"

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    pragma to disallow the "indirect object" syntax such as: 
    my $obj= new Neural::Net( "adaptive" );

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    which is already heavilly discouraged by many.

    I knew that < exit &main( @ARGV ) > would fix the problem because "&main" is no longer a bareword. Finding that declaring "sub main" also fixed it got me wondering.

    Since normally the parens in "main( @ARGV )" are clearly enough to tell Perl that "main" is a subroutine (you may need an & to tell Perl that you want your subroutine and not some built-in with the same name), the fact that "exit main( @ARGV )" always worked for me convinced me that I wasn't being ambiguous.

    But it appears that exit() being a function isn't enough to cause Perl to interpret "exit main( @ARGV )" as "exit( main(@ARGV) )". But having "sub exit($);" is enough.

    This confuses me because I thought one of the big problems with the indirect object syntax was: 

    package Widget;
use WingNut;

sub new {
    # Doesn't matter
}

sub Method {
    my $self= shift( @_ );
    $self->{SubObj}= new WingNut(@_); # oops!!
}

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    because that last line would call Widget::new() instead of WingNut::new(). But it "works" for me. Oh well.

            - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")
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RE: Re: Tk: exit main(@ARGV); fails
by Adam (Vicar) on Nov 09, 2000 at 01:36 UTC
    This is unlikely the problem. saying func() with the parens like that is enough for the compiler to note that func is a subroutine. It doesn't matter where you declared it because all subroutines are package scoped and compiled before runtime. Also, the error for using an undeclared subroutine is different from the one that Tye got.

    It looks to me like something is up with exit wherein it has been defined with the expectation that it gets a number. Hmmmm Tye, did you try having main return 1?

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