From: tony summerfelt <snowzone5@...>
Date: 2004-06-15T06:58:41+09:00
Subject: undefine

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004 05:31:30 +0900, you wrote:

>What about the logic of your code or design depends on the 'existence'
>of a variable?  What problem is it you're trying to solve with this
>approach?

just makes the code shorter. here's an excerpt of a log trimming
program in perl (for the format that binkd generates) ('@' precedes
arrays in perl):

while(<binkd>)
{
    # date parsing code was here
     @diff=Delta_DHMS(@binkdate,@today) if /(\[\d+\])/;
     print $trimmed $_ if $diff[0] < $ARGV[1] && defined(@diff);
     next  if defined(@diff);
     print $trimmed $_ if ! /(\[\d+\])/;
     undef(@diff);
}

this goes through each line in the log file.
if the log line contains a date stamp, it's processed and written to
an archive file if it meets the criteria, and the next line in the
file is read.

some lines are blank but i want written to the archive file for
cosmetic purposes. i COULD rewrite the perl code to NOT use
defined/undef (tim toadie and all that). but i don't have to.

when i ported it to ruby i found the equivalent ruby code longer.
maybe when i know the language a lot better it won't be  and i'll find
a shorter way of doing it...