Hi,
Browsing perlvar the other day, I noticed a deprecated variable called $#
controlling the printing of floating point values. The examples I found of
its usage hinted at sprintf style formatting and in fact it appears to work
oK. However, I got curious enough to try out format chars other than g with
disastrous results. I do admit that playing with a deprecated variable in an
unintended manner is sort of asking for trouble, but I didn't expect the
whole perl interpreter to crash without any debug messages.
Here's the code which runs fine till the last print statement, and even has
time to nag about the $# variable.
use strict; use warnings;
my $pi = 3.141592; # some double value.
local $\ = "\n";
local $# = "%+.3g"; # Normal usage.
print $pi; # works fine.
$# = '%s'; # But an invalid format.
print $pi; # crashes the interpreter.
I mainly posted this to find out more on Why it crashes, just out of
curiosity. If there's something wrong with a regular printf it rarely causes
this bad results in my experience. So, I wonder why $# is so fatal.
I'm running Active State Perl v5.8.7 build 815 [211909]. The OS is XP Pro
SP2 with all the latest fixes and this is an HP & Compaq NX8220 laptop, in
case it has any relevance.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/
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