On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 13:43:14 -0800, John W. Krahn wrote:
Ah, but there is an important difference - in all the cases I wrote, the characters following the '@' sign could not be a legal variable name,
$ perl -le' @) = qw/ a b c d /; print for @) '
Educational thread, this :-)
perldoc perlop [snip] Quote and Quote-like Operators [snip] Interpolating an array or slice interpolates the elements in order, separated by the value of $", so is equivalent to interpolating "join $", @array". "Punctuation" arrays such as "@+" are only interpolated if the name is enclosed in braces "@{+}".
Ah, *now* I see why both my code and yours work - in my case, the
"variables" were not interpolated according to the rule you just
quoted. In your code:
$ perl -le' @) = qw/ a b c d /; print for @) '
There is no interpolation going on, so '@)' is treated as a variable name. Quick reality check for myself:
$ perl -le' @a = qw/ a b c d /; print for "@a"'
a b c d
$ perl -le' @) = qw/ a b c d /; print for "@)"'
@)
Now all is well :-) But now I'm confused - if you knew of the above rule, why take me to task for not escaping the '@' sign in my code?
Because I can. :-) No really, some versions of Perl will report that as an error.
perldoc perl56delta
[snip]
In string, @%s now must be written as [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The description of this error used to say: (Someday it will simply assume that an unbackslashed @
interpolates an array.) That day has come, and this fatal error has been removed. It has
been replaced by a non-fatal warning instead. See "Arrays now
always interpolate into double-quoted strings" for details.John -- use Perl; program fulfillment
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