farang has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings monks, new Perl hacker here, about three weeks into the journey, having fun and figuring out the lay of the land.

Alright, so perldoc -f say tells me this:

This keyword is available only when the "say" feature is enabled; see feature. Alternately, include a "use v5.10" or later to the current scope.

This leads me to believe the following code shouldn't work.

use strict;
use warnings;

say STDOUT 'like a charm';

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Yet with an explicit filehandle, it does work (tested on v5.16 and v5.14). The question in this case is: why does the code work?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Unexpected behavior of function 'say'
by tobyink (Canon) on Mar 05, 2013 at 15:22 UTC

    It's the indirect method call syntax. Your code is interpreted as:

    use strict;
use warnings;

STDOUT->say('like a charm');

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    So you're not using the say keyword; you're using the say method in IO::Handle.

    package Cow { use Moo; has name => (is => 'lazy', default => sub { 'Mooington' }) } say Cow->new->name
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Re: Unexpected behavior of function 'say'
by toolic (Bishop) on Mar 05, 2013 at 15:21 UTC

    Tip #6 from the Basic debugging checklist: B::Deparse: 

    use warnings;
use strict 'refs';
'STDOUT'->say('like a charm');

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    Not that I know what that means, but it is a clue.

    Also, when I run the code on 5.12, I get an error: 

    Can't locate object method "say" via package "IO::File" at ...

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Re: Unexpected behavior of function 'say'
by LanX (Saint) on Mar 05, 2013 at 15:24 UTC
    hmm not in 5.10

    lanx@nc10-ubuntu:~$ perl
use strict;
use warnings;

say STDOUT 'like a charm';
Can't locate object method "say" via package "IO::Handle" at - line 4.

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    But the last line should lead to the answer.

    print FH is (supposed to be) indirect object syntax of the filehandle-object, so somehow the method say was activated by default in your environment.

    Anyway calling say w/o FH shouldn't work!

    Cheers Rolf

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      This is because of a change in Perl 5.14:

      Filehandle method calls load IO::File on demand

      The OP's code does work in Perl 5.10, if you run it with the -MIO::Handle parameter to manually load the IO::Handle package.

      package Cow { use Moo; has name => (is => 'lazy', default => sub { 'Mooington' }) } say Cow->new->name
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        So print FH was magic in doing so prior to 5.14?

        I hate breakes in symmetry...

        BTW: I checked IO::Handle , it's a normal method and features aren't checked.

        sub say {
    @_ or croak 'usage: $io->say(ARGS)';
    my $this = shift;
    local $\ = "\n";
    print $this @_;
}

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        Cheers Rolf

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