I understand you find it confusing, but there is a valid reason for it.

The basic principle is that you get a slice of exactly the length you asked it to be, padded with undefs if necessary, UNLESS the whole slice would have to be padded with undefs, in which case you get an empty list which is FALSE in any boolean test.

Actually it is a clear application of the principle of least surprise:

Sometimes I like to think that the authors of Perl have thought long and hard and deep about all these issues. It is a comforting thought.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

My blog: Imperial Deltronics

In reply to Re^3: Array slices: beyond the end/ Assigning an empty list to a Hash slice by CountZero
in thread Array slices: beyond the end/ Assigning an empty list to a Hash slice by 7stud

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