silly question about shift

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

sub a {
  my %conf = ( blah => 1200 );

  $conf{ shift };
}

print a('blah');
[download]

I'm just curious why this sub doesn't print "1200". Does the shift fail because it's in a different lexical scope than the enclosing subroutine?

Comment on silly question about shift Download Code

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Re: silly question about shift by japhy (Canon) on Aug 31, 2001 at 04:40 UTC
Any bareword found inside `{...}` is taken as a single-quoted string. You must make `shift` not a bareword. `$conf{+shift} $conf{shift()} $conf{shift @_}` [download] _____________________________________________________ Jeff`[japhy]`Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker. `s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;`	[reply] [d/l]
(Ovid) Re: silly question about shift by Ovid (Cardinal) on Aug 31, 2001 at 04:42 UTC
Because it's looking for a hash element named 'shift'. Try the following: `sub a { my %conf = ( blah => 1200 ); $conf{ +shift }; } print a('blah');` [download] Cheers, Ovid Vote for paco! Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: silly question about shift by Anonymous Monk on Sep 01, 2001 at 08:09 UTC
1 you don't return anything from the function. 2 shift needs an array; $hash{} needs a key; obviously not going to work	[reply]