Hi anagramster,

If you use strict and warnings (or at least warnings), you should get a warning like:

Found = in conditional, should be == at scope_test.pl line 5.
[download]

For example, in the following code:

use strict;
use warnings;

while (my $y = 1) {
    $y = 0;
    print "hello (y = $y)\n";
}
[download]

You will get the warning about "= in conditional".

It's also interesting to note that this test program, which is essentially equivalent to:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $y = 0;
while ($y = 1) {
    $y = 0;
    print "hello (y = $y)\n";
}
[download]

will never terminate, even though $y is set to zero each time, because it's set to 1 immediately before the condition of the while statement is evaluated.

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