Consider that "declarations" are actually executable code. They have
compile-time meaning, but many also have runtime meaning. This is most
obvious when it's a variable with an initializer: the initialization is at
runtime, not compile time. Which means MAIN has to run after all such, or
variables won't be initialized properly.
Most commonly you would not combine a MAIN sub with non-declaring code.
On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 5:32 PM Laurent Rosenfeld via perl6-users <
perl6-users@perl.org> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> The documentation for the MAIN sub says that "the sub with the special
> name MAIN is executed after all relevant phasers."
>
> My understanding is that MAIN automatically executes before any code other
> than phasers happening at compile time or at the end or right after the end
> of compilation. It seems that this is not the case. It seems that my
> perception is wrong and that code not belonging to any sub is executed
> before MAIN.
>
> For example, take this code:
>
> sub execute_after_main(Str $string) {
> say "this $string after MAIN?";
> }
> execute_after_main("1");
>
> sub MAIN() {
> say "This is MAIN so this should print first";
> }
> execute_after_main("2");
>
> This prints the following:
>
> this 1 after MAIN?
> this 2 after MAIN?
> This is MAIN so this should print first
>
> I was expecting the MAIN message to be printed first.
>
> Did I miss something? Is my understanding wrong? I'd never seen that, but
> I guess all my scripts using MAIN had all the code in subs called from
> MAIN. So maybe I've never hit that case.
>
> Cheers,
> Laurent.
>
--
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