"Bizarre copy of HASH in sassign..." bug

[kj]

Everyone once in a while, my code produces an error message that
looks like this:

Bizarre copy of HASH in sassign at /usr/share/perl/5.10/Carp/Heavy.pm line 96

I think it's an internal bug somewhere, and I can usually find a
way around it, but still, it's puzzling.

The latest manifestation of this problem occurred while I was
writing unit tests for a module. My test script uses Test::More::throws_ok
to check some error conditions. When checking this one error
condition, it generates the message copied above. But if instead
of writing my test like this:

throws_ok { should_fail() } qr/something went awry/, "exception raised";

I write it like this:

eval { should_fail() };
ok $@ =~ qr/something went awry/, "exception raised";

everything's fine: the test passes, and the "Bizarre copy of HASH..."
error disappears.

If anyone can shed some light on this problem, I'd appreciate it.

TIA!

~K

 

[Ilya Zakharevich]

Bizarre copy of HASH in sassign at /usr/share/perl/5.10/Carp/Heavy.pm line 96

eval { should_fail() };
ok $@ =~ qr/something went awry/, "exception raised";

everything's fine: the test passes, and the "Bizarre copy of HASH..."
error disappears.

If anyone can shed some light on this problem, I'd appreciate it.

IIRC, this appears only when one inspects Perl stack, right? Well,
Perl stack is not refcounted, so anything may the there. There is no
guarantie that it contains valid values...

Yours,
Ilya

 

[kj]

Ben, Ilya: Thanks for confirming my understanding of the situation,
and for the additional info on it.

Quoth kj <[email protected]>:

ITYM Test::Exception?

Yes, that's what I meant. Thanks for the correction.

~K