Parens within parens [was: RE: Uploaded v2 of my bind patch, too]

On Sun, 10 Jul 2011, Reverend Chip wrote:
> But it would be the first time parens *within* parens would have a
> meaning, and I'm not sure I like that.

No, there is at least one existing case already:

$ touch foo; perl -we '$_="foo"; unlink(())'; ls -l foo
-rw-r--r--  1 jan  staff  4 10 Jul 23:45 foo

$ touch foo; perl -we '$_="foo"; unlink()'; ls -l foo
ls: foo: No such file or directory

It is documented functionality, but making a distinction between passing
an empty list, or passing no arguments always felt wrong to me.  Of course
I wouldn't want unlink(@empty) to delete whatever is in $_, so I would
have preferred if unlink() had been a no-op.

Cheers,
-Jan

• Parens within parens [was: RE: Uploaded v2 of my bind patch, too] by Jan Dubois
• Re: Parens within parens [was: RE: Uploaded v2 of my bind patch,too] by Aristotle Pagaltzis
• RE: Parens within parens [was: RE: Uploaded v2 of my bind patch, too] by Jan Dubois
• RE: Parens within parens [was: RE: Uploaded v2 of my bind patch, too] by Jan Dubois