Says YuckFoo:
If $x is a filehandle, of course I am printing contents of $y to filehandle $x.
You seem to have missed the point here. That's probably my fault.

You said "If $x is a filehandle...". How can you tell if $x is a filehandle? (Answer: You can't.)

If Perl is smart enough to know it's a filehandle, why isn't it smart enough to use it as such?
Perl doesn't have any magic way to know it's a filehandle. That's why you have to leave off the comma. The missing comma says "By the way, this is a filehandle."

Let's try a slightly more concrete example:

    $x = 'STDERR';
    $y = "I like pie.\n"
    print $x, $y;

[download]
Now what?

--
Mark Dominus
Perl Paraphernalia

In reply to Re: Perl's Bad Ideas by Dominus
in thread Perl's Bad Ideas by japhy

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.