empty agreed, so it should be undef no?

In fact, Perl hints the contrary in perldoc perldata:

       You may have an optional comma before the closing
       parenthesis of a list literal, so that you can say:

           @foo = (
               1,
               2,
               3,
           );
[download]

Conclusion: no bug, although not precisely documented to work with embedded comma as well as trailing comma.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Thanks merlyn, this seems like a credible explanation. Although as I said in the CB it seems like a bad call (contrary to DWIM, as well as the behaviour of about every other language.)

Nevertheless I would like to post this to perl5porters, if only to get the documentation improved. That would be the correct forum wouldn't it?

Yves / DeMerphq
--
When to use Prototypes?

This has been posted to p5p in the past. See here. FWIW I was said user, and that was less than 6 months after I started learning Perl.

IMHO the best possible documentation is to firmly get down Perl's idea of what a list is versus what a scalar is. If you understand what a list is, then it is obvious that ,, shouldn't insert an undef. If you don't, particularly if you are translating some VB code that uses commas as placeholders...