I'm not entirely sure what the problem is, but you could improve your datastructure and get your is_master() sub a lot shorter (or even ditch it entirely). Instead of an array, put your bot masters in a hash:

my %masters = (
    John    => 1, 
    Paul    => 1, 
    George  => 1, 
    Ringo   => 1, 
);
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And then replace all calls to is_master() with exists $masters{$name}.

Hmmm not a solution, but a cool idea.

Thanks, hardburn, I'll try that.

BTW, the only problem is that doesn't solve my strict handicap and I wanna be a nice Perl programmer and not the evil one I've used to be *lol*


my ($author_nickname, $author_email) = ("DaWolf","erabbott\@terra.com.br") if ($author_name eq "Er Galvão Abbott");

• Starting with the call to do_command(), you set $nick to be the value provided by $event->{nick}, but you don't test to see if this value is "defined" or non-empty
• You pass $nick to do_help(), and this sub doesn't check whether $nick is defined either -- all it does is...
• Pass the value on to is_master(), at which point it is used for the first time in a conditional statement, where "strict" will complain that it's bad to use "eq" when one value is undefined.

As for the other things within do_command and do_help that seem to be using $nick without any trouble, you should be aware that it's possible, grammatical, and no problem under "use strict", for a hash key to be an undefined value (although if you "use warnings" or include the "-w" flag, you will get run-time warnings about assigning to or referencing a hash element using an "undef" value as the hash key -- e.g. try the following test script, with and without the "-w" flag (or with and without "use warnings;"):

use strict;
my %hash;
my $key = undef;
$hash{$key} = 3;
print "A hash element with value $hash{$key} is stored with key=$key\n
+";
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If the $nick isn't being initialized, you could just get around this by doing a conditional assignment. my $who = $_[0] || 'narf';

This would result in a non-initialized value to return false. This might not be the ideal solution, however...

die "\$_[0] is undefined\n" if not defined $_[0]; ... as the first line of your is_master() sub. I think you'll find that on this particular invocation of the sub, you'll die.

The next step will be to figure out why you're passing an undefined value as a parameter to is_master().

Actually I did, I call the is_master sub on the do_help sub wich is called by the do_command sub...

I'm starting to think that this is either a ppd(ActivePerl's module format) bug or an ActivePerl bug since I've tested it again without any changes and haven't got that error this time, althrough I always get these:

Use of uninitialized value in exists at C:/Perl/site/lib/Net/IRC/Connection.pm line 519.
Use of uninitialized value in exists at C:/Perl/site/lib/Net/IRC/Connection.pm line 519.
Use of uninitialized value in string eq at C:/Perl/site/lib/Net/IRC/Connection.pm line 1941.
Use of uninitialized value in string eq at C:/Perl/site/lib/Net/IRC/Connection.pm line 1941.


with some variations on line numbers... I've first thought that my error was generating these, but since I've only got these this time, I think it's a module problem.

I'll do some tests on Linux and get back to you guys.

Thanks,


my ($author_nickname, $author_email) = ("DaWolf","erabbott\@terra.com.br") if ($author_name eq "Er Galvão Abbott");

The point of putting an exists in is that it works independantly of the actual value in the hash. Perhaps in the future, the program would be expanded to add levels of 'mastery' over the bot, which is implemented by putting different values in the %masters datastructure. In that case, exists $masters{$user} would still tell you if $user is a master, even if it's a user at level 0.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

:(){ :|:&};:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

Ah, but if you encapsulate the check in is_master, you only have to update that function once if you ever decide to track user levels.

my @masters = qw/ John Paul George Ringo /;
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use strict;
my @masters = qw/ John Paul George Ringo /;

sub is_master
{
    my $who = shift;
    return scalar grep /^$who$/, @masters;
}

for (qw/ John George James /) {
    if (is_master($_)) {
        print "$_ is master\n"
    } else {
        print "$_ is not master\n"
    }
}
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John is master
George is master
James is not master
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return scalar grep /^$who$/, @masters;

Why use a regular expression when you are looking for string equality? What would your code do if $who contained something like 'foo^bar', 'foo{2}', or 'foo[bar]' (all of which are legal IRC nicks?) I think the hash idea given by hardburn is better than a grep, but if you wanted to use grep you should probably do it something like this:

sub is_master { scalar grep $_[0] eq $_, @masters }
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And if you wanted to be sure it behaved exactly like the original sub, always returning either a 0 or a 1:

sub is_master { scalar grep $_[0] eq $_, @masters and 1 }
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-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";