Autovivification is one of Perl’s really great design success.

It all comes to you don’t need to worry about existence before dereferencing something.

That means, for setting a nested hash, you only need to write:

$h->{foo}{bar} = "value";

And that will work out of the box. Perl will happily create all the data-structure for you.

So, now a little coding test, what does the following code output?

my $a;

if ($a->{foo}{bar}) {
   print "Found foo/bar\n";
}

if ($a->{foo}) {
   print "Found foo\n";
}

Naively, it shouldn’t output anything, right?

Not so fast. Upon a careful read of “Perl will happily create all the data-structure for you”, we can put some emphasis on one word : “Perl will happily create all the data-structure for you”.

That might be just perfect, except that Perl creates it whenever it needs it, even if it is only for reading.

And now you understand the catch : a read operation can result in a write one.

As Uncle Ben (from SpiderMan) said1 : “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”.

Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker showed me a nice autovivification module on CPAN that fixes this behavior, and enables a fine tuning of this process.

I really think the fact that creation also happen when querying the value is a real bug in Perl itself, or at least a bug in the design of the feature.

  1. Voltaire, Franklin D. Roosevelt and other said something very similar, but they are not as geeky. ↩