What everybody said, but also note there's something else going on. To
paraphrase the Tao Te Ching:
The $a that is assigned to is not the true $a :)
To see for yourself, rename the variable to $x:
% perl -Mstrict -wle 'my $x = (27>20) ? $x = "big" : $x = "small"; print $x'
Global symbol "$x" requires explicit package name at -e line 1.
Global symbol "$x" requires explicit package name at -e line 1.
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
What's going on?
You can't use $x until the my is in scope, which isn't until the next
statement. But $a, unfortunately, is exempt from this rule. Together
with $b, it's a special case to let you write things like
@descending = sort { $b <=> $a } @list;
So, if your friend really had $a there, it's the wrong $a. It's a
package globan in whatever package they're in. And it can spell two
kinds of bugs; first, it might overwrite somebody else's value if they
use $a too, and second, if the sub this is in happens to close over
$a, it'll close over the lexical $a, the one declared by my and never
used elsewhere.
So: use strict, and avoid $a and $b. :-)
On 6/20/07, Yossi Itzkovich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> A college here wanted to write this code:
> my $a=(27>20)?"big":"small";
>
> And instead wrote:
> my $a= (27>20)?$a="big":$a="small");
>
> Surprisingly $a was set to "small". Why ?
>
> Yossi
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
--
Gaal Yahas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://gaal.livejournal.com/
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