On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Larry Wall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 11:00:09AM -0700, Jon Lang wrote:
>
> : all unary operators, be they prefix or postfix, should be evaluated
> : before any binary operator is.
>
> And leaving the pool of voting mathematicians out of it for the moment,
> how would you parse these:
>
> sleep $then - $now
> not $a eq $b
> say $a ~ $b
> abs $x**3
Those don't strike me as being unary operators; they strike me as
being function calls that have left out the parentheses. Probably
because they're alphanumeric rather than symbolic in form.
> These all work only because unaries can be looser than binaries.
> And Perl 5 programmers will all expect them to work, in addition to
> -$a**2 returning a negative value.
True enough. Perhaps I should have said "as a rule of thumb..."
> And we have to deal with unary
> precedence anyway, or !%seen{$key}++ doesn't work right...
>
> Larry
>
--
Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang
