On Mar 13, 1:37 am, Carl Banks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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
And theres me thinking it was part of Perls AWK compatibility code. - Paddy. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
