Sun, 14 Jan 2007

Connections

My brother, Brent, is the Climbing Ranger at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. He makes an appearance in the recent climbing film First Ascent. I bought a copy as soon as it was available and love it. It’s a fantastic piece of work. You’ll enjoy it even if you have no clue what rock climbing is all about.

The soundtrack is fantastic, too. I found myself re-watching one particular segment repeatedly just to hear the music, How It Ends by DeVotchKa. Christopher gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card for Christmas. I used it to buy the CD.

With a little curious web-surfing, I discovered that DeVotchKa provided much of the music for the film Little Miss Sunshine recently released on DVD. Jenny and I watched it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it.

So, because of a vertical rescue my brother lead a couple of years ago, I enjoyed the movie Little Miss Sunshine that I would never have given a second glance. He may have never heard of it, himself.

I feel like I’m inside a James Burke episode of Connections.

[/general] [link]

Sat, 13 Jan 2007

Inconceivable!

Every once in awhile, perl still gives me a surprise. This past week, I ran into a bug that had me stumped for quite awhile. I was using a common loop construct with an iterator object. But unexpectedly, the object returned by the iterator was getting trounced. I was getting “Can’t call method on an undefined value” errors.

In frustration, I added some diagnostics at the very top of the loop:

While ( my $obj = $iterator->next ) {
    warn "Inconceivable!" unless defined $obj;
    ...

Sure enough! The program began shouting warnings. How can $obj be defined in the loop conditional then undefined on the very next line of code? Inconceivable!

Or not. Perl provides another way to get to that next line of code.

Farther down in the code:

   # we need to skip some objects
   1 while ( $obj = $iterator->next && $obj->some_method );
   last unless $obj;
   redo;  # <-------- $obj is defined and healthy here

perldoc says:

The “redo” command restarts the loop block without evaluating the conditional again. The “continue” block, if any, is not executed. If the LABEL is omitted, the command refers to the innermost enclosing loop. Programs that want to lie to themselves about what was just input normally use this command…

Even though the conditional is not re-evaluated, $obj goes out of scope and we get and brand new, undefined $obj at the top of the loop, thanks to the my declaration in the loop conditional. That makes some sense (perfect sense if you understand the perl internals—I can’t claim that). It caught me off guard.

One simple way to solve the problem is to move the my declaration outside the loop. In my case, I was able to eliminate need for the redo.

Another lesson learned—the only way they stick—the hard way.

[/programming] [link]

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