On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Michael Lazzaro wrote:
> What is the utility of the perl5 behavior:
>
> \($a,$b,$c)
>
> meaning
>
> (\$a, \$b, \$c)
>
> Do people really do that? ... Can someone give an example of an actual,
> proper, use?
Yes, I've used it like this:
for (\($a,$b,$c)) {
$$_++;
}
to be sure that it works on all versions, since
for ($a,$b,$c) {
$_++;
}
works differently on different versions. (Actually, I don't have an
old-enough version on hand to check just when that was, so it must have been
5.004 or before.)
This change didn't start to bite me until P5.6.0, when "values %HASH" became
an Lvalue too, whereupon
for ( values %HASH ) {
s/^prefix//;
...
}
... do something else with %HASH
stopped working.
So, I would urge making as many things as possible Lvalues (and magical
references) right from the start of P6, just so as we don't break things by
making them so later.
-Martin
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