if($l=~/^\[([^\]]+)\]/) {
   $j=$1; $k=$1;
   $j=$1, $k=$2 if($j=~/^([^\|]+)\|(.+)$/);
            
   $url[$uc]=$j; $l=$k; $op="url$uc"; $uc++;
   print "$op --> $j | $k\n";
            
   $main_index_list->insert("end",$l,$op);
   $main_index_list->tagConfigure($op,-foreground=>"blue", -data=>$j);
   $main_index_list->tagBind($op,"<3>",eval "sub{do_url('$op');}");
}
[download]

--
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

No. Stop with that eval. You are re-compiling that code every time you call that. There's no need.

$main_index_list->tagBind($op, "<3>", do { my $thing = $op; sub { do_u
+rl($thing) } });
[download]

That'll be faster, safer, won't leak memory like a sieve, and if you had made $op a lexical variable earlier, could have been just written as :

$main_index_list->tagBind($op, "<3>", sub { do_url($op) });
[download]

But since I don't know the scope of $op, I wrote it safely.

Please eliminate the runtime string-eval there! Please. It's so very unneeded.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Merlyn wrote "That'll be faster, safer, won't leak memory like a sieve"

Is Merlyn saying that poorly coded Perl can leak memory?

According to the Memory Advisor page "A leak is a data area that your program allocated but did not free, even though your program will not use the memory again. In many instances, the data area has no pointer..."

I thought that Perl takes care of such matters automatically, and that memory leaks were not a problem in Perl programs. Now I think from the comments of Merlyn and others that memory leaks can indeed be a problem in Perl.

For instance, Jamie Zawinski wrote in a 1998 article that

just about all of the open source garbage collectors are junk (e.g., Perl, Python, and Emacs.) Perl's GC is an especially bad joke: if you have circular references, the objects won't get collected until the program exits! Give me a break!

Do poorly-coded Perl programs really contain memory leaks?