A friend of mine who has a Java background was getting excited about some of the things that he can do in Perl. Because of his background, he is used to using the "dot" syntax to access methods and properties in objects.

I was looking at one of his scripts and he was asking why a particular hack of his worked. Seems he was trying to access the length "property" of an array, but had an interesting workaround to get it right:

my @stuff = qw(one two three);
my $length = (@stuff.length)/10;
print $length;
[download]

He was a little put out when I couldn't stop lauging.

Cheers,
Ovid

A little hint for monks who don't get what's going on right off the bat: the dot in this context acts as a concatenation operator.

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