O Monks-
I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought that 7 years of coding Perl would've taught me most of the tricks... or, at least, brought me the insight to explain this little puzzle. A coworker brought this to my attention:

Given an array...

@foo = (1,2,3);

This statement

print "@foo[1]\n";

Yields

2

I thought that this would be invalid Perl, yet it works. Given that you declare @foo, it even works under strict (though warnings will generate a message like "Scalar value @foo[1] better written as $foo[1] at C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP\FOO.PL line 6.").

Anyone have an explanation of this behavior?

--
Jason Klueber
ookami@insightbb.com

/(bb)|[^b]{2}/
--Shakespeare

Fixed square brackets - dvergin 2003-08-04

In reply to @array[1] is valid?? by jdklueber

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.