i like repetetive music

Work is sending me on a Perl Training Australia course this week, so I’m getting to hang out with Paul and Jacinta and get a good refresher on Perl OO. I wouldn’t say I needed it, but I’ve been enjoying the discussion and it never hurts to make sure that your accumulated understanding matches the current reality.

One of the exercises involved a class representing a coin with methods to flip the coin. One of the things we were asked to do at one point was to create an array of coins and do various things to them. My first instinct to create the array was to do this:

my @coins = (Coin->new) x 10;

I was saddened but not surprised to find that this doesn’t work. As the following test demonstrates the left hand side is only evaluated once and then just copied, so I ended up with an array containing ten references to the same object:

$ perl -E '$c = 0; @x = ($c++) x 10; say @x'
0000000000

The best I could come up with is this, which I don’t think reads anywhere near as well:

my @coins = map { Coin->new } (1..10);

We briefly discussed whether it would be worth developing a core patch to do something like it, but realistically the only option that preserves a reasonable amount of backward compatibility is to only reevaluate the left side for a very specific set of types, namely code references, giving something like this:

my @coins = (sub { Coin->new }) x 10;

Given that that really doesn’t read particularly better than the version using map, and not knowing if anything smarter is possble (and how to do it if it is), and knowing that the core developers aren’t particularly keen on new features to existing constructs at the best of times, I’ve opted to leave it for now but keep my eyes open for things like this.

One part of another exercise had me dealing with decks of cards. Internally I represented suits as integers, with the following list to assist with the as_string method:

my @suits = qw(hearts spades clubs diamonds);

When I got to adding the initialiser for the class, naturally I wanted to be able to specify a string. The usual thing I’d do here is create a hash from @suits with the values as the integer array indexes. This time I came up with this one-liner to determine the index of a value in an array:

my $index = do { my $found; grep { $found = 1 if $_ eq $needle; $found ? 0 : 1 } @haystack };

It plays on the fact the grep in scalar context returns the number of matches; that is, the number of times the code block evaluates true. All this does is arranges it such that the block is true for every array index before the wanted value but false for every index after (and including) the wanted index. If $index == @haystack, then it wasn’t found.

Its certainly not optimal - a binary search is always going to be quicker, and you’d nearly always want to use the hash method if you were doing it many times, but it was certainly fun to write a cute oneliner to do it.