I thought that seeing it on my screen would make it easier to understand. I'm missing something here. I was kind of expecting the array to be unchanged ... but that's not what happened:

$ perl -MData::Dumper -e '@x=0..10; undef @x[2..7]; print Dumper(\@x)'
$VAR1 = [
          0,
          1,
          2,
          3,
          4,
          5,
          6,
          undef,
          8,
          9,
          10
        ];

[download]

Obviously, if undef worked as is otherwise expected, all numbers from 2 through 7 would be undef. What surprised me here is that 7 still is undef'd. Something funky is happening.

Not that I'd ever have this problem in production code - I don't ever have the need for this type of behaviour (undefing a slice)... and would have thought about using @x[2..7] = () first anyway.

Update: Yeah, Roy Johnson explained it - I see that now. However, it's still a bit buried, and Roy Johnson's lengthier explanation below is much clearer. Thanks, Roy!

In reply to Re^4: hash slice by Tanktalus
in thread hash slice by pglenski

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