On Mar 12, 8:11 pm, Justus Schwabedal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > What do you need it for anyway? I just read about it and I think it's > useless > in python.
Perl, like Python, has a separate compilation and run times. One day, someone who was trying to use Perl for something asked, "You know, wouldn't it be neat-o if you could execute some Perl code *before* you compiled the script?" And so (since that's usually enough reason to add something to Perl) was borne the BEGIN block. I believe the official rationale was that they wanted to add some magic variables that affected Perl's compilation and couldn't do it without a magic block that executed at compile time. Python solved a similar problem by introducing __future__ imports. Carl Banks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
