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Postings from June 2010
On Wed, Jun 02, 2010 at 12:46:44PM +0000, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> Single-character non-alpha (plus _) subroutines are global
>
> $ perl -le '** = sub {warn "Hi"}; package Foo; &*'
> Hi at -e line 1.
>
> $ perl -le '*a = sub {warn "Hi"}; package Foo; &a'
> Undefined subroutine &Foo::a called at -e line 1.
>
> and:
>
> $ perl -le '*_ = sub {warn "Hi"}; package Foo; &_'
> Hi at -e line 1.
>
> $ perl -le '*__ = sub {warn "Hi"}; package Foo; &__'
> Undefined subroutine &Foo::__ called at -e line 1
>
> This came up when I was looking at _() in Perl as a potential Gettext
> wrapper (I know about the _ filehandle).
>
> _ I think I can understand (presumably the _ glob is global). But why
> does this apply generally to all /^[\W_]$/ subs? Is it explicitly
> documented somewhere? Perhaps it's something we'd want to deprecate?
>
Documented. From perlvar:
Perl identifiers that begin with digits, control characters, or
punctuation characters are exempt from the effects of the "package"
declaration and are always forced to be in package "main"; they are
also exempt from "strict 'vars'" errors. A few other names are also
exempt in these ways:
ENV STDIN
INC STDOUT
ARGV STDERR
ARGVOUT _
SIG
In particular, the new special "${^_XYZ}" variables are always taken to
be in package "main", regardless of any "package" declarations
presently in scope.
Note also that perlvar claims all such names are reserved for special uses
by Perl. From the same manual page:
Perl variable names may also be a sequence of digits or a single
punctuation or control character. These names are all reserved for
special uses by Perl; for example, the all-digits names are used to
hold data captured by backreferences after a regular expression match.
Perl has a special syntax for the single-control-character names: It
understands "^X" (caret "X") to mean the control-"X" character. For
example, the notation $^W (dollar-sign caret "W") is the scalar
variable whose name is the single character control-"W". This is
better than typing a literal control-"W" into your program.
Basically, it comes down to, "if it global, you can't have it anyway".
Abigail
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