Word of the Day: Autovivification

Just a real quick post to share some ‘fun’. I’ve noted already that I’m using perl in my work now. I’ve used it some in the past, but I couldn’t describe myself as an expert by any stretch of the imagination. I find myself regularly encountering things that require a quick refresh or even in depth investigation from one of the many fantastic sources out there. Today’s Problem de Jour is references.

What is a reference? All languages have variables to store information. Further all (that I have ever encountered) have a concept of references so that you can refer not to the data but to the spot in which the data resides. Fun stuff. It brings back fond memories of my early comp sci classes, which were in Pascal, and there were no end of jokes about the reference operator ‘^’, which is called ‘hat’. One uses it frequently with any sort of data structures and is more often than not found in tandem with the ‘.’ operator (‘dot’) to access values within a record, such as one that might be found in a linked list data structure. For young comp sci students, who are easily amused, this opens up a wide array of jokes in the vein of ‘^.this’ and ‘^.yourmom’. Programmer humor. It’s terrible, I know.

That all was a huge aside (funny, this was supposed to be a real quick post…) to the point that I’m finally really learning what is going on with references in Perl. As I’m reading along, I came upon the aforementioned word of the day, autovivification. It’s such a great (funny looking and sounding) word, that I had to share it. For those curious, here is what Wikipedia has to say regarding it:

Autovivification is a unique feature of the Perl programming language involving the dynamic creation of data structures. Autovivification is the automatic creation of a reference when an undefined value is dereferenced. In effect, this causes access to a nonexistent element of a hash (associative array) orarray to create both the hash or array, and all elements below the given index for the array.       

Yeah, it’s mostly unintelligible to me as well. I know enough about it to know I don’t need to worry about it at this stage. Yet another thing that I know I don’t know. And that’s ok!

Jobified: Day 1

(click the image above to visit the Panaramio.com site that hosts the full size image)

It’s especially hard, after nearly a year of sitting around watching TV and playing WoW, to wrap my head and body around a full-time job. I’ve been trying very hard to encourage myself to adjust to a more job-friendly sleep schedule, but the past couple of weeks have been particularly hard to motivate myself to do much of anything at all. I have been extremely fortunate in my job hunt and by all measures have managed to find exactly the right job. I worry that some might think that I will see it as some sort of justification, to which I can firmly state ‘not at all’. I hope this is the start of a positive spiral to counter the negative spiral that has been consuming me and my time for so long.

So, day one is done.

No, I will *not* comply!

This one kind of stands on its own. Food for thought for every one of us in America. (Thanks, Clint, for the link.) It really is time for me to find a good book on the Constitution. I don’t read enough anymore.