On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Myers, Dirk wrote:
> >Suppose you could specify the value with which all variables
> >in the enclosing scope should be initialized; for example:
>
> I haven't seen this either, but I suggest that it should be a set of
> pragmas:
> use init_scalar 0 ;
> use init_array () ;
>
> ... especially because I'm not sure what effect :
>
> init_vars = \{} ;
>
> my @foo ;
>
> should have. (Probably none, but how do you specify default values if you
> want to init multiple kinds of data in the same scope?)
My suggestion would be that it simply have no effect. On the
other hand, if a "initial size" attribute were added to arrays, then this
could be very useful...say that you have 50 employees, each of whose data
is stored in a hash. Here's an easy way to get a list of references to
all the hashes, with error handling built in:
init_vars \{name => 'NONE'};
my @employees : size 50; # 50 entries, each a ref to 1 elem. hash
@employees = get_from_db('*');
for (@employees) {
if ( $_{name} eq 'NONE' ) {
die "Oops! DB error\n";
}
}
Dave
