I think I understand, now, why this doesn't work:

my $name = 'Myles na Gopaleen';
print (split ' ', $name)[-1];

[download]

and I know that I can get it to work like this:

print +(split ' ', $name)[-1];

or else like this:

print ((split ' ', $name)[-1]);

My question is this: where is this particular (not to say peculiar:) syntax required? For example, I can do this:

push @surnames, (split ' ', $name)[-1];

No unary plus sign, no problem. Does this mean that there are different types of list context?

I thought that it might be a special syntax construct for print. But I found more surprises in store, when I discovered that this works:

print OUT (split ' ', $name)[-1];

Furthermore, my researches turned up a few things like this:

my @year = map +(localtime $_)[5], @records;

What is it I'm missing?

TIA

dave

In reply to Confused about unary + by Not_a_Number

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