Yeah, but I was under the impression the patch was supposed to improve Boolean context. And several sources claim that Perl is internally subdividing scalar context into Boolean, string and (various) numeric contexts.
At the language level, Perl doesn't formally divide scalar contexts into sub-contexts. But behind the scenes, such distinctions are sometimes used for optimisation purposes. For example, when length() is applied to to a utf8 string and length() is in boolean context, it's cheaper to just return an indication of whether the length is non-zero or not, rather than having to do a potentially expensive bytes-to-chars conversion behind the scenes to calculate an accurate integer length value.

In the case of PADSV op, in scalar (but not boolean) context, to return an actual integer value, it has to create a temporary SV, set it to the size of the array, and return it. This is quite expensive, and so for the special but common case of the array being empty, it's cheaper to return the immortal PL_sv_zero SV. Which should make no difference at the language level.

Was it ever discussed to add a flag "initial_type" to scalar vars
It's been discussed from time to time. It's hard: there aren't many spare flags, and there are many places in the src where initial values may get set, and even more once XS code is taken into account. And even the very definition of initial value is up for debate. For example, in /(\d+)/ && $i = $1, should $i's initial value be regarded as a string or integer?

Dave.

In reply to Re^4: Reason for this discrepancy with scalar? by dave_the_m
in thread Reason for this discrepancy with scalar? by kikuchiyo

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