Your analysis of the third case is wrong. What do you expect from $x = (10, 20, 30)? If you expect 3, you're wrong -- you get 30. In this case, (10, 20, 30) is not even a list. The parentheses are used to change precendence here. Inside the parentheses are three expressions separated by the comma operator which, in scalar context (which this is), evaluates the left-hand operand and returns the right-hand operand. If we didn't have parentheses, we'd set $x to 10, and the values 20 and 30 would be in void context.

As for the fourth case, I can think of cases where I want to initialize an array to holding just one element, an array ref. More often than not, I'd expect I'd have that array ref be empty, but it's really a matter of what I'm doing.

Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart

In reply to Re: Some Insights from a Traveler Between Languages by japhy
in thread Some Insights from a Traveler Between Languages by skyknight

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