comment on

For historical reasons, to make it easier for perl to parse your Perl, eval is classified as an expression.

As an expression it needs to be seperated from the next expression so that perl doesn't get confused.

The advantage of having it as an expression is that it can have a return value. (In this case, the result of the evaled code)

By adding a ; to the end of an expression it turns it into a statement.

The ; is not added automatically because this would make the job of parsing harder for perl. Different languages have different approaches to dealing with this, but as a member of the C family - Perl requires certain statements to be delimited explictly with a ;.

-Andrew.

Andrew Tomazos | andrew@tomazos.com | www.tomazos.com

In reply to Re: eval with semicolon by tomazos
in thread eval with semicolon by mosh

Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.


Problems? Is your data what you think it is?
	PerlMonks