On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 4:33 PM, Stefan Weiss <[email protected]> wrote:
> This is called "autovivification" in Perl-speak, and it's intended to
> make life easier by reducing the amount of typing (same thing we're
> talking about here). Unfortunately, it will also do this if you just try
> to read a value:
>
*That* was it! I knew Perl had a term for this.
> my $bar = {};
> if ($bar->{hey}{ho}{lets}{go}) ...
>
> - and bam!, $bar is now -
>
> {
> 'hey' => {
> 'ho' => {
> 'lets' => {}
> }
> }
> };
>
>
IMHO, this behavior might make things easier when you're going to assign
> values, but on the flip side, it can and often will create unnecessary
> objects (hashes) when you only wanted to read a value. This can easily
> happen in situations where a module maps a tree (like XML) to a hash of
> hashes, or similar structures.
>
Just because Perl is broken doesn't mean Javascript has to be :) Why not a
constraint that says "don't create objects unless there's an assignment"? I
mean, once you know that something at depth n is undefined, you know that
everything at depth n+m is undefined as well, right?
PS. I still love Perl, weird as it is :)
>
>
Evil! Outcast unclean! :)
_jason
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