I'm polishing up a little code for some code I am sending to a potential employer, but I have encountered this weirdness in perl's syntax. Here is the skinny.

sub shift_sort {
    my %hash = (1 => { foo => bar }, 2 => { baz => bletch });
    shift @{ sort( { $a <=> $b } keys (%hash)) }; # doesnt work
    my @foo = sort( { $a <=> $b } keys (%hash));
    shift @foo; # works
}
[download]

if we look at perldoc -f scalar we see

There is no equivalent operator to force an expression to be interpolated in list context because it's in practice never needed. If you really wanted to do so, however, you could use the construction @{ (some expression) }, but usually a simple (some expression) suffices.

I've been away from perlmonks for a few days because my rassin-frassin ISP has been offline for a week. I am aware that Dominus has posted an excellent article on list vs. scalar context, but I only have another fifteen minutes left in the lab, and I needed to get the question asked (and hopefully answered). I am totally stumped here. I fixed it using @foo, but I would really rather not. Note please that this is working code that I was cleaning up, rather than broken code I need to fix -- so its a convenience and a courtesy more than anything. But I'd ideally like to get this done by monday when its supposed to be there. :)

indebted,
brother dep.

--
Laziness, Impatience, Hubris, and Generosity.

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