On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 11:54:06PM -0600, John Williams wrote:
> After testing various cases of x, I came up with one that I cannot
> explain. Can someone tell me what is happening here (in perl5)?
>
> $ perl -le 'print "@{[ $a = ('a','b') x 3 ]}"; print $a'
> a bbb
> bbb
>
> or in other words, after evaluating "@a = $a = ('a','b') x 3",
> $a is 'bbb' and @a is ('a','bbb') !
Well, Deparse says:
$ perl5.6.1 -MO=Deparse -le 'print "@{[ $a = ('a','b') x 3 ]}"; print $a'
print "@{[$a = x 3];}";
print $a;
-e syntax OK
but if I use a nice new perl (where someone, IIRC Rafael Garcia-Suarez, has
fixed many many bugs):
$ perl5.8.0 -MO=Deparse -le 'print "@{[ $a = ('a','b') x 3 ]}"; print $a'
BEGIN { $/ = "\n"; $\ = "\n"; }
print "@{[$a = ('a', 'b') x 3];}";
print $a;
-e syntax OK
and interestingly, perl 5.8.0 gives a different answer from the perl you ran:
$ perl5.8.0 -le 'print "@{[ $a = ('a','b') x 3 ]}"; print $a'
bbb
bbb
so I'd say that what you see is a bug, and it's already fixed in 5.8
Nicholas Clark
--
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