I agree with you. I don't know why this was done. Sounds like a case of consistency gone wrong, but maybe it's a side effect of another fix?

Executing the following should find the commit in which this changed. 

git clone git://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git perl
cd perl
./Porting/bisect.pl --target=miniperl --start=v5.16.0 --end=v5.18.0 \
    --expect-fail -e 'grep(1)'

[download]

Until Monday, the only unix machine to which I have access is my web server, and my web host frowns on spending that much CPU. :)

In reply to Re: why allow grep with no list? (Re^3: compare always true in grep) by ikegami
in thread compare always true in grep by RonW

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