As you know, near the airport of Smolensk Tupolev 154-M aircraft with President Lech Kaczynski crashed. President of the Polish National Bank also died, the head of the IPN (National Memory Institute), the Sejms and Senats (both chambers of parliament) vice heads – (Putra, Bochenek, Szmajdzinski), the former president in exile Kaczorowski, presidential ministers, Chief Gen. Gągor, the ombudsman Janusz Kochanowski, wife of the President, members of Parliament (Gosiewski, Wasserman, Jaruga-Nowacka, Szymanek-Deresz and others), bishop Tadeusz Płoski and others. Probably when making the second approach to landing plane collided with trees and crashed.

A few rather obvious parallels arise:
- that in the Katyn Polish intelligentsia perished and now again, many representatives of the Polish intelligentsia died there.
- Second, the General Sikorski and his unexplained aircraft accident
- Third – that 5 years ago, in the day before the Divine Mercy Sunday, 7 days after Eastern died Pope John Paul II. This year, exactly the same vigil before that Sunday, the President and others died.

Read more of you want:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Sikorski#Death
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Mercy_Sunday

See also:

1. Nice people I met at YAPC::EU – continued
2. Frozen Perl soon
3. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP)

Turn AdBlock off and look at right column. First, there are ads about perl – form Gabor – I wrote about it here. Then a few adsense (from Google). They should match the content of this blog. And then is a link to one particular book I like very much.

And guess what? No one clicks the ads from Google. I see that in my stats. Even though those ads are matched to site content – as you can see. I doubt if anyone clicks the ads from Gabor either (by analogy – beside, I guess, most geeks use adblock and similar solutions – so they do not even see it – and those ads are intended for THEM). If you have clicked and ad here – either from Gabors perl ad server, or google – raise your hand (add a comment).

See also:

1. Advertise Perl with Gabor
2. Microsoft bots made DDoS on CPAN
3. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – binmode, charset

See http://jquelin.blogspot.com/2010/02/ironman-challenge-status.html and http://www.lowlevelmanager.com/2010/01/perl-iron-man-challenge-is-cron-still.html

wtf?

See also:

1. WTFish side of using Perl talk at YAPC::EU 2009 – slides
2. YAPC::EU 2010 Pisa – my presentation
3. More on foreach localisation

One day I was using global var in script (lame, I know). I wanted to use it in foreach. And its value magically disappeared when called other subroutine. This was strange.

This was a script to make reports for customers. The code looked like this (many parts taken out for brevity and to protect the innocent ) :


#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $custid; # to store customerid.
my %rep_conf;
$rep_conf{'Something-GmBH'}{'custid'}=12345;
(...more config data kept in that hash...)
my $cust_name; # customer name
foreach $cust_name (keys %rep_conf) { # in that hash we get report configuration. The key was customer name.
print("$cust_name"); # here is still exists
$custid = $rep_conf{$cust_name}{'custid'}; # customer id was taken from config hash
$firstsheet = &get_sheet; # get data for our report
(...)
sub get_sheet {
print($custid); # works
print($cust_name); # empty. WTF?
(...)


I scratched my head – why the $custid value exists and $cust_name value disappeared?

I had I hunch to read about foreach in perl docs:

The foreach loop iterates over a normal list value and sets the variable VAR to be each element of the list in turn. If the variable is preceded with the keyword my, then it is lexically scoped, and is therefore visible only within the loop.

Sounds rational. But it was no “my” there:
foreach $cust_name (keys %rep_conf)

Otherwise, the variable is implicitly local to the loop and regains its former value upon exiting the loop.
If the variable was previously declared with my, it uses that variable instead of the global one, but it’s still localized to the loop. This implicit localisation occurs only in a foreach loop.

Here is the mystery solved.  Strange indeed – only for/foreach loop behaves like this.

See also:

1. Perl 5.10.1
2. Perl WTFs – last in function
3. Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – part 2 – Encode

• http://perl.baczynski.com/lisboa/WTF.odt
• http://perl.baczynski.com/lisboa/WTF.pdf

Feedback about my talk is appreciated, use comment field below

See also:

1. My presentation at YAPC::EU::2009 was graded
2. YAPC::EU 2009 in Lisboa (Lisbon, Lizbona)!
3. Nice people I met at YAPC::EU

for … {

something…;

function();

something… that would not be executed…

};

sub function {

something something…

last; # by mistake, maybe it should be a “return”?

}

For some people it is a WTF, for some it is very logical way , that it should work like.

What do you think about it?

See also:

1. WTFish side of using Perl talk at YAPC::EU 2009 – slides
2. More on foreach localisation
3. Perl 5.10.1