Argh, I did it again! I used shift like this:

shift;
do something with $_;

[download]

and then spent longer than I care to admit wondering why I wasn't getting the milage I expected. What I needed of course was:

$_ = shift;
do something with $_;

[download]

Why doesn't shift (and similar usage) assign to $_ if no lvalue is specified? It doesn't DWIM!

Perl is Huffman encoded by design.

In reply to shift doesn't DWIM by GrandFather

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