I am using pdl2 (the PDL shell) also as a my default Perl interactive shell (it loads all the nice plugins for Devel::REPL). But I am missing the x dumper-printing alias. p is nice for piddles but it does not work for a normal array ref or hash ref. I have loaded Data::Dumper but it lacks an easy way of controlling depth and I like the way you can quickly set depth limits with x, e.g. x 2 $deep_datastruct for complex data structures. But with Data::Dumper the process is more cumbersome:
pdl> say $c
HASH(0x53b0b60)
pdl> p $c
HASH(0x12b14018)
pdl> use Data::Dumper
pdl> p Dumper $c
$VAR1 = {
'c' => {
'c' => 3,
'a' => 1,
'b' => {
'c' => '3',
'a' => '1',
'b' => '2'
}
},
'a' => 1,
'b' => 4
};
pdl> $Data::Dumper::Maxdepth = 1;
pdl> p Dumper $c
$VAR1 = {
'c' => 'HASH(0x97fba70)',
'a' => 1,
'b' => 4
};
In the Perl debugger you can achieve the same thing with x 1 $c directly. Does pdl2 have something similar and so concise?
[update]
And related with this question: does pdl2 or Devel::REPL have convenience functions like the Perl debugger commands m or y? Or should one create a module with PadWalker