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Postings from October 1999
Ronald J Kimball <rjk@linguist.dartmouth.edu> wrote
> At 12:14 26/10/99 -0400, Jeff Pinyan wrote:
> >Why does
> >
> > sub foo (;$);
> > print foo $a, $b;
> >
> >whine that foo has too many arguments?
>
> I might expect that to be parsed as:
>
> print foo($a), $b;
Me too! :-)
And I thought "Hey - that's all documented in perlsub" and went to look
it up. I expected to find an example like
sub mylength(;$) mylength $a
but it wasn't there. Instead there was
sub myrand ($) myrand 42
But I can write
print rand,rand;
and it Does The Right Thing. Whereas if I write
sub myrand($) { rand() };
print myrand,myrand;
I get
syntax error at - line 2, near "myrand,"
So there seems to be a serious confusion between the prototypes (;$)
and ($). The builtins such as length() and rand() behave as if they
had prototype (;$), but are documented as having ($). And a user
defined subroutine can't imitate them with either prototype.
Mike Guy