After abigail's post, it's clear how $# works. Perl calls the builtin sprintf with a single floating point argument, and the resulting text is the string representation of the number (if $# is set). You can even decompose a double to two ints by setting $# to "%x/%x". This explains the strange strange phenomena that setting $# to a stupid value causes.

However, as an interesting consequence you can still segfault perl with some code like perl -we '$#="%s\n"; print exp 1;' or perl -we '$#="%n\n"; print exp 1;'

In reply to Re: $#="%c"; possible bug by ambrus
in thread $#="%c"; possible bug by ambrus

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