First of all, I'd like open and opendir to have returned an open handle, or undef on failure, instead of changing a passed argument on the side. But Joost already mentioned that.

And second, I find it not just odd but also extremely annoying how the -X operators ignore parens as a hint for parsing precedence. Take this example: 

print -M($0) + 1;

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This yields: 
Argument "test.pl" isn't numeric in addition (+) at test.pl line 2.
Use of uninitialized value in print at test.pl line 2.

Perl treats this the same as 

print -M ($0 + 1);

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Not exactly what I had in mind. You have to wrap the parens around both operator and argument, to make it behave like I want. Just like Applescript. 

print +(-M $0)+1;

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In reply to Re: Perl oddities by bart
in thread Perl oddities by brian_d_foy

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