A happy new year to all you venerable monks,

I hope this node isn't a harbinger of things to come this year ... just when I thought I was beginning to understand something, along comes the fickle finger of fate to point out the following (AFAICT) anomaly: running this one-liner doesn't produce the expected fatal not an object error.... 

pointo1d@unforgiven:~/workspace/SVC-ArgsParser$ perl -Mstrict -we 'sub
+ can_it { $_[0]->can(qw/can/) } my $f = qw/fred/; $f->can(qw/isa/); c
+an_it(qw/fred/)'
pointo1d@unforgiven:~/workspace/SVC-ArgsParser$

[download]
Deparse shows, AFAICT, that there's nothing untoward going on from a parsing POV... 
perl -MO=Deparse -we 'use strict ; sub can_it { $_[0]->can(qw/can/) } 
+my $f = qw/fred/; $f->can(qw/isa/); can_it(qw/fred/)'
BEGIN { $^W = 1; }
sub can_it {
    use strict 'refs';
    $_[0]->can('can');
}
use strict 'refs';
my $f = 'fred';
$f->can('isa');
can_it 'fred';
-e syntax OK

[download]
Question is, am I, once again, missing something obvious ? I was expecting a fatal error, at the very least, from the $f->can(qw/isa/) statement - but self-evidently didn't get one ... from either of the potential sources !!

FWIW, I'm running 5.8.8 on Ubuntu.

A user level that continues to overstate my experience :-))

In reply to Arrgh, can() appears to work for non-object !! by Bloodnok

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