in reply to Re: Re: First char out of a string & surprises with errors on chop reverse $string (that doesn't work!)
in thread First char out of a string & surprises with errors on chop reverse $string (that doesn't work!)

How often have you wanted to say: 
reverse $foo = "merlyn";

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in sensible code? That's why it doesn't return an lvalue!

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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Re: Re: Re: Re: First char out of a string & surprises with errors on chop reverse $string (that doesn't work!)
by eduardo (Curate) on Dec 26, 2001 at 22:03 UTC
    Definite agreement... reverse $foo = "merlyn"; makes little to no sense. However, chop reverse $foo; does seem relatively reasonable... (though I see how it quickly goes to hell in a handbasket.) I remember when in my Data Structures in C++ class they tried explaining the reason to overload some operators as lvalues, and some not... it always seemed like you could *find* a scenario where you may want that functionality (though I doubt 2 + 2 = $foo; would ever be a good one :) Well... thanks to everyone for the answers! I am going to agree that it really makes very little sense to let reverse return an lvalue... though I think the obfuscation "value" alone may warrant it :)
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      though I doubt 2 + 2 = $foo; would ever be a good one :)
      "2 + 2 equals $foo, for certain values of 2"... hmmm...

      No, really, i think 2 + $bar = 3 would be a nice way to write $bar = 1, but _very_ hard to make. 

      2;0 juerd@ouranos:~$ perl -e'undef christmas'
Segmentation fault
2;139 juerd@ouranos:~$

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