On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Michael Lazzaro wrote: > What is the utility of the perl5 behavior: > > \($a,$b,$c) > > meaning > > (\$a, \$b, \$c) > > Do people really do that? ... Can someone give an example of an actual, > proper, use?
Yes, I've used it like this: for (\($a,$b,$c)) { $$_++; } to be sure that it works on all versions, since for ($a,$b,$c) { $_++; } works differently on different versions. (Actually, I don't have an old-enough version on hand to check just when that was, so it must have been 5.004 or before.) This change didn't start to bite me until P5.6.0, when "values %HASH" became an Lvalue too, whereupon for ( values %HASH ) { s/^prefix//; ... } ... do something else with %HASH stopped working. So, I would urge making as many things as possible Lvalues (and magical references) right from the start of P6, just so as we don't break things by making them so later. -Martin -- Help Microsoft stamp out software piracy: give Linux to a friend today...