Unifying Contradiction

I would say that the inner workings of Perl were grotty, were it not that I know of many nice grottos far less grotty than perlguts.

So, my discovery of today is that the following code works:

eval{ use Foo::Bar }
eval{ use Foo::Bar } if $@;
eval{ use Foo::Bar } if $@;
die $@ if $@;

But this doesn't:

sub tryit($) { for(1..3){ eval $_[0]; return 1 if !$@ } die $@; }
tryit("use Foo::Bar");

Or, that is, it claims to work, but the exports of Foo::Bar are nowhere to be found...

Anyway, I finally realized I only called tryit 6 times in my code so I simply pasted in 6 copies of the first solution. One day I'll figure out what I SHOULD have coded, when I'm not under such deadline pressure.

Oh, and the above is necessary since, under Win98, if I fork two perl tasks and they load the SAME libraries, then every now and again one of the loads fails for no reason. Retrying twice seems to limit the scope of the problem. FIXING the problem is left as an excercise for the reader.

So, had fun at the mouse house today. Enough folks showed up that it was much fun. Must do it again soon.

Now though, I have some files I have to write up, collect together and mail off to _sps_ as a way of delegating some of my website work for the Toronto Worldcon (and yeah the website sucks. I had nothing to do with the parts you can see from that link.)

This last week has been kind of hectic. I am simultaneously

A) brushing up on my Perl,
B) Learning how taint perl works,
C) Learning the CGI:: and XML::Parser perl libraries
D) learning how CGI interfaces work,
E) Learning HTML, and
F) Learning Javascript

With the exception of Perl, my knowledge of all of these things last Friday was negligible.

I've always meant to learn these things mind you, just not all in the same week. And now, off I go to do some e-mailing, and then I can sleep.

So, this time _sps_ was NOT exactly correct, and he needs to apologize. I asked him to write a little XML parser for me on the weekend, and he threw something together from the XML::Parser Perl library I had, saw that it produced nothing, and told me that my library or interface to it was broken. I've now download and tested half-a-dozen examples of uses of this exact same library, and they work as advertised.

So, now I'm gonna have to read the docs and find out why the library didn't work as expected, and will have to do the work myself. Harrumph!

But at least I get to feel smug about catching _sps_ in an overt error. I don't get to do that very often.