On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 10:21:00PM -0600, Steve Peters wrote: : A recent bug that showed up in Perl 5 caused a few people to wonder what : the purpose of C<not()>. It worked up to Perl 5.6 and returned the same : value as C<not(0)>. Starting with 5.6, it just core dumped. This has been : fixed it in the current bleadperl to go back to its original functionality of : behaving like C<not(0)>. Obviously, this is not a regularly used functionality : since it took almost five years to be found. The question that a few of us : discussed is whether it should be allowed at all? Is it a syntax error? : If not, what is its purpose?
In Perl 6, not() happens to be a list op just to save a precedence level, so calling it with 0 args is legal and happens to return a null list in list context, and undefined in scalar context, I expect. Sometimes my expector is suspect, however. Larry