The Universe of Discourse Sat, 08 Jul 2006  A programmer had a
problem... A while back, I wrote an article in which I mentioned
a programmer who had a problem, tried to solve it with weak
references, and, as a result, had two problems. I said that weak
references work unusually well in that little formula.
Yesterday I was about to make the same mistake. I had a problem,
and weak references seemed like the solution. Fortunately, it
was time to go home, which is a two-mile walk. Taking a two-mile
walk is a great way to fix mistakes, especially the ones you
haven't made yet. On this particular walk, I came to my senses
and avoided the weak references.  The problem concerns the
following classes and methods. You have a database object $db.
You can call @rec = $db->lookup, which may return some record
objects that represent records. You then call methods on the
records, say $rec[3]->get_color, to extract data from them, or
$rec[3]->set_color("purple"), to modify the data in the records.
The updating is done in-me