v5.8.8. So yeah, it winds up suddenly auto-vivifying a few million array elements. You must have gotten lucky that your memory address just happened to look like a negative number.

Yup, that's what I did too! Now I laugh hysterically at it in hind-sight.

Ok, here's another simple bug that had an unexpected symptom..
my $spi = [5,6];
my $ind = [2];
$spi->[$ind] = 7;

Why might line three take thirty full seconds to execute?

A bit of a difference though. I'm Canadian as well. Our economy doesn't struggle the way theirs does.

I can tell the difference quite easily. Americans buying european cars improves european economies. Americans buying chinese cars improves chinese economies. What I can't figure out is what would happen if Americans were to buy american cars. hmmm.

I have no intention to take away from the good-will intentions here. What Starbucks is providing is very nice, and very neat. But you just know that it's profitable too right? So much is likely left out. Obviously starbucks isn't paying full price, business relationships are discounted all the time. And obviously the university is offering retail space to starbucks as a result too. In two years, you'll see government agencies giving money to starbucks for this program, especially as retail profits get channeled through this program's obvious expenses and losses, which will again save starbucks some money in the form of taxes. They'll likely also have avenues where they qualify as a charity, or as an educational agency. And since they are funding later-year students (only teasing early-year students) they'll wind up getting employees who plan to finish university, which means they'll get higher-quality employees from the start -- for those four years at least. And parents won't argue with students working more if that's what's paying for the school.

It's a great business tactic in every way.

Wow, you are incredibly confused. b = {}; doesn't modify b, it re-assigns b. Please learn how variables work. And if you think that "1" and true are different values, then you don't understand what a "value" is.

So you and I are obviously done here. You're either really old, used to bit-registers not complex objects, or you're really young reading text books, or you've navigated the industry by avoiding business-level programming. I've focussed on business-level programming. In this sub-industry, everything you've said simply isn't true. a==b, b==c, would never presume a==c. It's never true in real-world business, so I'd never want it to be true in business programming.

So I'll leave you with this, because it makes one angle very clear. Have you ever used perl? Perl does something interesting in this regard. Printing a reference to a variable (we'll call these objects conversationally here) never attempts to cast anything. It simply prints out the type and memory address. So a = {foo:1,bar:[123]} might be "HASH(32598763)". It actually is the memory address, but it's more than that. Because if you're numerically comparing it to another variable, it'll get cast as a number -- the memory address. In perl, using the value of a reference requires explicitly dereferencing it, making this particular issue quite straight-forward -- especially since casting is done on operators, not on values, which is awesome by the way.

Javascript does some of the same stuff, but conceals it all. Like most languages, lvalues are cast differently than rvalues. But because javascript is designed, primarily, for non-algothimic and non-scientific use, of course [] is 0. There are six versions of nothing, and whether you have nothing once or you have nothing multiple times, you still have nothing. But you've only gone half-way with your last example there. Add a numerical 0, as well as a null value, then the fun really happens. Try "0happy" too. Woah the fun you'll have!

Here's the skinny. I've been using javascript for professional profit for 17 years. I've needed to use === merely four times. Let's ignore, for the moment, how stupid javascript is in many ways, and especially in this crazy-casting way -- because it is crazy-cryptic to anyone who hasn't memorized it all, and there's always one thing that's forgotten. The real question is what would a programmer expect from string == object? Why would a programmer be comparing a string to an object in the first place?

If we're talking about a complete logic error, then I don't really care what a language does when I screw up my entire concept. If it's a convenience service, then as long as the language is consistent then I'm fine with whatever it's going to do.

Pop quiz. What do you think perl does with "5" + "information". The answer may surprise you. Here's a hint, it actually casts "information" to a number because the first three letters match a defined numerical value.

Well, seeing as how I guarantee that my clients won't need stuff re-written, that I maintain their loyalty for years and sometimes decades at a time, and that I guarantee minor changes forever for free, if that were me I'd have gone bankrupt long ago.

But I certainly agree that my previous reply is consistent with what you describe. Alas, it was one of many replies, each incomplete as a character description of my business.

var a = {'v':[{'a':1,'b':2},{'a':1,'c':5}],'z':[1,8,4]};

What do you think the value of a is?

Like I said elsewhere, I didn't say 20 years. I didn't say linearly. I didn't say only. I didn't say as an adult. Learn to do business math.

Dude, I'm not 40. I said well over. I own a house, a sprotscar, travel 40 days per year, and am semi-retired at 35. Learn to do business math. You dropped the "well over", you averaged linearly, and you took two decades to mean 20 years. In business, 2 decades can mean as little as 2 years, but usually means at least 12 years. Most people make more money as they grow their business from the age of 14.

At the height of my full-timeness, I was making $150'000. Today, semi-retired, I choose to stop at $100'000 because I'd rather spend the time enjoying my hobbies than making more money to spend on them.

Enjoy your life. I sure won't.

The bow wasn't an analogy. It was real.

You might have noticed that the two decades began at a very young age, includes a large house, a sportscar, and semi-retirement at age 35.

Why would I choose to write weird branched code that can't be debugged atomically when I can instead write atomic code that branches? I don't use a debugger. I use something called "truth statements". Truth statements don't need to get debugged as a whole; they get debugged individually -- atomically.

That concept of multitude is completely foreign to a C programmer. It makes them fail every time. You simply cannot introduce a C programmer to Perl and expect them to have any kind of easy time with it. You might as well introduce a cyclist to a horse.

no make files of any kind. just file-save, ctrl-s will do just fine.

But like I said before, you count your millions of dollars, and I'll count mine. I have no interest in listening to you re-iterate what others have taught you. I roll my own. The day that you build your own IDE, that's the day that you can tell me how good it is. Until then, mine is better than yours purely because mine fits me while yours fits somebody else.

Enjoy your one-size-fits-all tools. I'm far too flexible and powerful to benefit from your tools. Alternatively, enjoy building your house with your swiss army knife. It truly is an amazing tool -- as evidenced by the number of people who have one.

You might also try a='1', a=1, a=01, a='01', a=0, a='0', a=false, a='', and a=null.

Using a simple scalar integer isn't an example of anything. It's a grade 1 text book. Try harder.

learn to read. I said references. You might want to learn the differences between variables and references some day. Some of us have grown past a=1. For some of us, a = {'v':[{'a':1,'b':2},{'a':1,'c':5}],'z':[1,8,4]};

test my a' and my a.v, not your a. see what happens.