[Sorry if this isn't the place to post this, but I thought it might be interesting. Flaming will be accepted]
I'm teaching a Perl class from the Learning Perl book, and noticed an inconsistency with the way certain constructs work. In chapter 2 it mentions a rule in Perl: "any time that you need a variable in Perl, you can use an assignment instead. First, Perl does the assignment. Then it uses the variable in whatever way you requested". Ok, that makes sense. It allows you to do things like this: chomp( $foo = <STDIN> ); $x = $y = 10; Then in chapter 5 it discusses the each function, and why it works in a while loop. It says that (referring to the boolean value) "Now, when Perl evaluates the each %hash there are no more key-value pairs available. So each has to return an empty list. The empty list is assigned to ($key, $value), so $key gets undef, and $value also gets undef. But that hardly matters, because the whole thing is being evaluated in the conditional expression of the while loop. The value of a list assignment is a scalar context is the number of elements in the **source list** -- in this case, that's 0". So this adds to the first rule (sort of). Basically in scalar context the function takes the variable as it's argument, and in list context it takes the count of items in the source list. ....Ok, that works for me so far, but then why would these work? $x = () = 10; # $x is 1 $x = () = (10, 20); # $x is 2 >From this it sounds like the first rule does not exactly work as stated. It seems that the real rule is that the "=" operator returns a value just like any other Perl operator. It seems to me that given "x = y" that the "=" operator returns the value from the right side of the operator (in the given context of x). So "x = y = z" means that "y = z" returns the value of z, and then "x = " stores that value. ...Or at least that is how I am conceptualizing it. ....And now the real question. Why won't this work? ($x) = () = 10; Is there a need for an extra rule to cover this? Or is there a single rule that covers the syntax from all of the above examples? Thanks. Rob -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
