Re^2: Truth and Falsehood

I've tested empty hashes on several perls here and they, like empty arrays, always appear to evaluate to zero as well. Is there a reason why you have expressed them differently here?

Just because that's what the Perl documentation says. perldata:

If you evaluate a hash in scalar context, it returns a false value if the hash is empty. If there are any key/value pairs, it returns a true value.

Comment on Re^2: Truth and Falsehood

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Re^3: Truth and Falsehood by hippo (Archbishop) on Aug 17, 2019 at 10:19 UTC
I see - thank you. Interestingly the very next sentence in perldata is: `A more precise definition is version dependent.` which suggests that there may be some versions out there where the false value returned is not zero (or that there may be in future, intriguingly). I'll have to try to remember only to test the truth of empty hashes rather than their numerical value. :-)	[reply]
Re^4: Truth and Falsehood by haukex (Archbishop) on Aug 17, 2019 at 10:30 UTC
`A more precise definition is version dependent.` which suggests that there may be some versions out there where the false value returned is not zero That sentence was introduced along with the change that `scalar(%hash)` returns the same thing as `0+keys(%hash)` instead of the bucket counts, so I suspect that's what it is referring to. But anyway, when the Perl documentation says "a false value" or "false", I don't make any assumptions of which of the possible false values it'll return `:-)`	[reply] [d/l] [select]