...although, what do they mean by "constant expression?"

Yeah, good question. Constant expression means whatever perl constant-folds at compile time. Numeric and string literals are constant, most simple operators (arithmetic and logic and things like that, but not including x) are constant-folded iff all their arguments are constants, and so are a few named builtins like uc, most other expressions aren't. There are some corner cases (like the comma operator) and even some version differences, so if you want to know for sure what's constant-folded and what isn't, you may need to dump the code with use O "Deparse"; or even use O "Concise";. If in doubt, just compare to $. explicitly if you want that semantics.

There are at least two other cases where an expression being constant matters in how your perl code is interpretted, though one of these might be a bug: Twin-lines japh and Re^3: A cleaner way of scoping variables.

In reply to Re^3: When doesn't the flip-flop operator work in all scalar contexts? by ambrus
in thread Why doesn't the flip-flop operator work in all scalar contexts? by siracusa

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