Re: why avoid & on function call (updated x 3)

In Perl 4 the &sigil was mandatory, Perl 5 changed this.

IIRC it has now a bunch of side effects like°

This can be very useful in edge cases <1‰, but will more likely cause trouble in normal use.

The only time you can't avoid &sigils in standard Perl5 is when referencing a named function ²

$code_ref = \&sub_name

°) other use case are:

calling a post-declared sub without parens().
E.G. like when wanting to use AUTOLOAD while avoiding parenthesis for syntactic sugar.
calling a sub named after a built-in
E.g. CGI.pm used to have a sub &tr for HTML's "table row" tag which collided with Perl's tr (IIRC)
²) some built-ins require & with named subs as arguments, like goto, map , grep , sort

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Re^2: why avoid & on function call (updated x 3) by Anonymous Monk on Dec 28, 2020 at 19:38 UTC
defined &func, exists &func, and goto &func (distinct from the troublesome goto LABEL) are some other examples when you would use the ampersand to refer to a named function. -Dan	[reply]
Re^3: why avoid & on function call (updated x 3) by LanX (Saint) on Dec 28, 2020 at 20:14 UTC
> are some other examples when you would use the ampersand to refer to a named function. goto was already mentioned :) > > ²) some built-ins require & with named subs as arguments, like goto, map , grep , sort Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :) Wikisyntax for the Monastery}	[reply]