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Postings from August 2001
On Mon, 27 Aug 2001, schwern@pobox.com wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 27, 2001 at 10:29:46AM -0500, Ren Maddox wrote:
>> The documentation of qw// states that a list is created. It needs
>> to be reworded in terms of context. Here's one attempt:
>
>
>
>> qw/STRING/
>>
>> Evaluates to a sequence of comma-separated,
>> single-quoted sub-strings extracted out of STRING,
>> using embedded whitespace as the delimiters.
>
> I'm with Ronald. The original description was better.
Yes -- I'm not happy with this sentence either. I was hoping for some
discussion of improvements.
>> In list context, it can be understood as being
>> roughly equivalent to:
>>
>> split(' ', q/STRING/, -1);
>>
>> the difference being that it happens at compile
>> time.
>>
>> In scalar context, it evaluates to the final
>> sub-string of the sequence.
>
> That's actually what a list does in scalar context (as opposed to an
> array, which returns it's number of elements.) Commonly confused.
> The clarification is good, especially since split() doesn't behave
> that way.
Except that the original point of this change is that there is no such
thing as a list in scalar context.
--
Ren Maddox
ren@tivoli.com
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