http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=438532


in reply to Should chomping a constant always raise an error?

Yours is a subtle question of typing. Possibly you are only talking about chomp because being a builtin the error is found at compile time; my_chomp won't be caught until runtime.

I agree with BigLug, it makes sense to complain for finding problems sooner. But this merely indicates that I accept the conventions surrounding const'ness. I don't want to change because the earliest finding of illogical actions in my code makes for easier coding in my view.

The view you consider, that const'ness be a protection given to a variable, seems less useful. If you wish to play with your idea further here is an imp (I think this is a bad idea as the resulting code seems misleading):

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; package protected; # constant data that doesn't complain, just doesn't change. # We could have a flag to allow a protected to store a value once; # We could have a "new" subroutine to hide the tied'ness. # Then usage would look like: # use protected; # my $ONE = protected->new; # $ONE = 'one'; sub TIESCALAR { my $class = shift; my $data = shift; return bless { data => $data }, $class; } sub FETCH { return $_[0]->{data} } sub STORE { return $_[0]->{data} } package main; my $THREE; tie $THREE, 'protected', "three "; $THREE = "four"; chomp $THREE; print "\$THREE >$THREE<", $/;
Be well,
rir