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From: composer@bucsf.bu.edu (Jeff Kellem)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: "MOST COMMON NOVICE BUG" contest
Message-ID: <COMPOSER.90Mar13154228@bucsf.bu.edu>
Date: 13 Mar 90 20:42:28 GMT
References: <15230@bfmny0.UU.NET> <15232@bfmny0.UU.NET> <1118@etnibsd.UUCP>
	<TOM.90Mar12071911@hcx2.ssd.csd.harris.com>
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In-reply-to: tom@ssd.csd.harris.com's message of 12 Mar 90 12:19:11 GMT

In article <TOM.90Mar12071911@hcx2.ssd.csd.harris.com> tom@ssd.csd.harris.com (Tom Horsley) writes:

 > Date: 12 Mar 90 12:19:11 GMT
 >
 > My most confusing bug as a novice user was believing that local() provided
 > some form of lexical scoping when what it really does is just push a new
 > definition for things with that name. I finally figured this out after
 > trying to debug something that looked like:
 >
 > sub fred {
 >    local($barney);
 >    ...
 > }
 >
 > ...
 >
 >    do fred($barney);
 >
 > It took me a long time to figure out why my subroutine 'fred' was never able
 > to get to the value I thought I passed as the parameter...

Well, not exactly.  You forgot to assign the @_ array (the args to the sub)
to $barney.

Probably what you wanted is something like...

	sub fred {
	   local($barney) = @_;
	   ...
	}

then...

	do fred($barney);

should do what you want.

Cheers...

				-jeff

Jeff Kellem
INTERNET: composer@cs.bu.edu  (or composer@bu.edu)
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