I would say that tr's "parameters" are more like a character class than a list. In particular, you can write a-z to mean all the letters from a to z. Calling it a character class, however, might suggest that it supports \w, \d, \s, etc.; unfortunately those are only available in the regular expression operators.

On the other hand, it is certainly inaccurate to say that a list in Perl is an anonymous array. Although this code features a list:   print "Hello ", $name, ", how are you?"; it does not feature an anonymous array.

I would say that a list in Perl is any grouping of scalars (including groupings of zero or one scalar) on the stack. An array is a list of scalars for which memory has been allocated especially (outside the stack), and an anonymous array is an array where there is no symbol name that refers to the array's memory.

In reply to Re: tr doesn't *really* use a list by chipmunk
in thread tr doesn't *really* use a list by Boldra

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