perl help?

[simX]

I'm going through the OReilly book called "Learning Perl", and they have an introduction section where they introduce some really basic stuff.

Here's the entire code for a short prog:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
%words = qw( fred camel barney llama betty alpaca wilma alpaca );
print "What is your name? ";
$name = <STDIN>;
chomp ($name);
if ($name eq "Randall") {
print "Hello, Randall! How good of you to be here!\n";
} else {
print "Hello, $name!\n"; # ordinary greeting
$secretword = $words{$name};
if ($secretword eq "") {
$secretword = "groucho";
}
print "What is the secret word? ";
$guess = <STDIN>;
chomp ($guess);
while ($guess ne $secretword) {
print "Wrong, try again. What is the secret word? ";
$guess = <STDIN>;
chomp ($guess);
}
}

The problem is that it doesn't work, because it seems that if the name is not in the hash, then it doesn't initialize the string, instead of giving it a value of "" like the OReilly book claims. Is this a bug, is it something stupid on my part, or is this something deliberate that can be worked around? If it can be worked around.. how?

UPDATE: Neeeevermind.. apparently it does that when you give perl the "-w" parameter. When you don't, the program works. Whatever.

 

[howardm4]

I'm suprised it doesn't do what the
book says because Perl is pretty
flexible that way and usually does
the right thing.

I'm not on a Unix box now to
prove/disprove it though.

I'd probably do

if (! defined $words{$name}) {
$secretword = 'groucho';
}
else {
$secretword = $words{$name};
}

 

[simX]

I just figured it out and updated my last post. It's because I'm using the "-w" operator.