On 5/5/05, Terrence Brannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I was looking at a line in the hangman program:
>
> @letters == @solution.grep:{ $_ ne '' };
>
> and was told that I was looking at an adverbial block.
>
> But I don't understand what that is and could not find a description
> and examples in a reverse search on dev and nntp.perl.org.
Methods with arguments require parens. However, the block to grep
isn't I<really> an argument. It's describing the manner in which the
array will be grepped... that's an adverb to grep.
So, why are the parens required on methods? Take the following if statements:
if @foo.shift { ... }
if @foo.grep { ... } # grep doesn't get the block
To make things clear, methods without parens are assumed to take no
arguments. In order to pass a block to the above grep, you either need
to use @foo.grep({ $^a <=> $^b}) or the adverbial colon:
if @foo.grep:{$^a <=> $^b} { ... }
Ashley Winters
