[comp.lang.perl] this is very strange

vixie@decwrl.dec.com (Paul A Vixie) (06/28/90)

>> I might be able to come up with some kind of a relaxed lvalue thingie
>> that creates array elements but doesn't squawk about non-lvalue-looking
>> items, but I'd have to think about it some.

Documenting it would be enough.  This is a pretty subtle side-effect.
I eventually redesigned the entire subroutine interface, so this no
longer affects me; I know that *I* will remember that $x{$y} can't be
reliably passed by reference if it doesn't preexist, but perhaps there
are a few thousand other perl programmers who would benefit from read-
ing about this before discovering it first hand :-).
--
Paul Vixie
DEC Western Research Lab	<vixie@wrl.dec.com>
Palo Alto, California		...!decwrl!vixie