I’ve hit what is either an egregious bug in ruby (1.8.4) or some
subtlety
that I haven’t grasped. [Most likely the latter… (:-)]
Briefly I had two arrays of symbol strings of which I wanted to find
which symbols occurred in both arrays, so I thought I’d use a hash with
the key being the symbol and the value a two element array that would
be used to flag which set(s) the symbol was found in. The following
is a simplified (and ‘instrumented’) version of what I was trying to
do:
listA=[“line1”,“line2”,“line3”]
listB=[“line5”,“line3”,“line4”]
table={}
table.default=[0,0]
print "table default originally: ", table.default, “\n”
listA.each {|a| t=table[a]; print a," – undef value: “,t;
t[0]=1; print " new value: “,t,”\n”;
table[a]=t}
print "table default now: ", table.default, “\n”
listB.each {|a| t=table[a]; print a," – undef value: “,t;
t[1]=1; print " new value: “,t,”\n”;
table[a]=t}
print "table default now: ", table.default, “\ntable contents:\n”
table.each {|k,v| print k, ": ", v[0], v[1], “\n”}
Now, in the ‘each’ statements, the variable ‘a’ should (except in one
case)
not be in the hash yet, so I would expect the original provided default
to
be returned. However, here’s the printout I get:
table default now: 00
line1 – undef value: 00 new value: 10
line2 – undef value: 10 new value: 10
line3 – undef value: 10 new value: 10
table default now: 10
line5 – undef value: 10 new value: 11
line3 – undef value: 11 new value: 11
line4 – undef value: 11 new value: 11
table default now: 11
table contents:
line1: 11
line2: 11
line3: 11
line4: 11
line5: 11
Dunhh? Why is the default value getting changed? I can’t see that
I’m resetting it anywhere. If I do the same sort of manipulations
outside of a block (one at a time in irb for instance) things happen
as I would expect – the default remains as set, and is returned for
any undefined key.
Illumination appreciated.
– Pete –
