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Yes, I also was there in those years. Perl snippets were shared by everyone, but almost nobody knew how they work, much less how to tweak them to adapt to new s
by otherme123 5y ago
Yes, I also was there in those years. Perl snippets were shared by everyone, but almost nobody knew how they work, much less how to tweak them to adapt to new scenarios or how to contribute to a library. I remember a snippet that read a FASTA file and counted the GC%, but it had an error somewhere that made it fail when it reached the 1001 sequence. Nobody was able to find the error, they just splitted the FASTAs in smaller files. Until someone wrote a less esoteric Python script, and the Perl snippet died.
- throwaway984393 5y agoMight be unrelated, but Perl does have a hard limit on recursion within the same function; after 100 recursions it'll die with an error and you have to unroll your loops.
- bmn__ 5y agoFalse. $ perl -Mwarnings -E'sub f { $c++; say $c if 0 == $c % 1_000_000; f() } f' Deep recursion on subroutine "main::f" at -e line 1. 1000000 2000000 3000000 4000000 5000000 6000000 7000000 8000000 9000000 10000000 11000000 12000000 13000000 14000000 15000000 16000000 17000000 18000000 19000000 20000000 Terminated You get a warning after 100 calls which almost always indicates a bug. In case it's a genuine deep recursion, the warning can be easily suppressed with `no warnings "recursion"`. On my computer, the program continues to run for about 10 seconds, consuming 9 GB virt./res. after which it is killed off by `earlyoom`.
- throwaway984393 5y agoIt might have behaved slightly differently 20 years ago when I ran into it :) or maybe I misremember!