I think you missed his point, if not the point of the whole meditation. The behavior you cite from the docs did not exist in 5.004_04. The fact that it didn't could result in some obscure bugs. I pointed out two ways you could run into trouble because of it. And theorbtwo was trying to point out another one. (He was wrong, but only because setting $/ to a reference to a number in order to read fixed length records was not supported in 5.004_04.)

You can test if you need convincing and you have perl 5.004_04 ;-) 

$ perl5.00404 -e '$/=\1; print "[$_]" while <>;'
abcd
0000
^D
[abcd
0000
]$

[download]
And if you need some evidence that the documentation you pasted is irrelevant to the case at hand: 
$ perl5.00404 -we'$/="0"; print $l while ($l = <>)'
Value of <HANDLE> construct can be "0"; test with defined() at -e line
+ 1.
foo000bar
foo0$

[download]

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

In reply to Re: Re: Re: To Kill a Meme: while(defined($line = <>)) by sauoq
in thread To Kill a Meme: while(defined($line = <>)) by sauoq

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