Hello, I've been working through Patrick Michaud's excellent videos from the The Perl Conference 2016. At about 35:45 of the following 2016 video (Part 1 of 2), Patrick discusses arrays:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySch4xpoPA0 At this point in the video, Patrick also discusses push() and pop() calls on arrays. For practice I tried pushing and popping strings in the REPL. However, I discovered an unusual property when I misplaced a semicolon during call to push(). See what happens below when a semicolon is included within the parentheses of push(): "This is Rakudo version 2018.12 built on MoarVM version 2018.12 implementing Perl 6.d." > my @countries = "UK", "Spain", "Slovakia", "Sweden"; [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden] > @countries.push("Finland"); [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden Finland] > my @countries = "UK", "Spain", "Slovakia", "Sweden"; [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden] > @countries.push("Finland";) [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden (Finland) ()] > my @countries = "UK", "Spain", "Slovakia", "Sweden"; [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden] > @countries.push("Finland";); [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden (Finland) ()] Misplacing a semicolon within the push() call adds two elements to the array. When I examine these two elements, I see that they are both "List" elements: > @countries[3].WHAT (Str) > @countries[4].WHAT (List) > @countries[5].WHAT (List) Apparently, multiple semicolons within push() will add multiple list elements to the end of the intended array: > my @countries = "UK", "Spain", "Slovakia", "Sweden"; [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden] > @countries.push("Finland";;); [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden (Finland) () ()] > my @countries = "UK", "Spain", "Slovakia", "Sweden"; [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden] > @countries.push(;;;;;;;); [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden () () () () () () () ()] It is surprising to me that "List" elements are appended to the array with push() as described above. If one tries to add one or more elements via indexing and there 'aren't enough elements' so to speak (by accident or design), the array grows by inserting "Any" elements, not "List" elements: > my @countries = "UK", "Spain", "Slovakia", "Sweden"; [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden] > @countries[5] = "Finland"; Finland > say @countries [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden (Any) Finland] > > my @countries = "UK", "Spain", "Slovakia", "Sweden"; [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden] > @countries[6..7] = "Finland", "Norway"; (Finland Norway) > say @countries [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden (Any) (Any) Finland Norway] I've briefly checked pop() to see if there are similar issues, but 1) placing a string within the parentheses of pop() will throw an error, and 2) placing a semicolon within the parentheses of pop() will throw an error. However, these error message are slightly different. A string argument to pop() will result in an error that says "Too many positionals passed; expected 1 argument but got 2" while a semicolon argument to pop() will result in an error that says "Too many positionals passed; expected 1 argument but got 3". > my @countries = "UK", "Spain", "Slovakia", "Sweden"; [UK Spain Slovakia Sweden] > @countries.pop("Finland") Too many positionals passed; expected 1 argument but got 2 in block <unit> at <unknown file> line 1 > @countries.pop(;) Too many positionals passed; expected 1 argument but got 3 in block <unit> at <unknown file> line 1 > Any help appreciated, Bill. William Michels, Ph.D. PS Thanks to Joe Brenner for talking over this Perl6 code with me.
