Larry Wall compares $_, which is also magical, to the pronoun "it." Generalizing we can say that all magical variables of this kind are pronouns, e.g., "he", "she", "thou" etc.

One of the great things about Perl is that Larry Wall when explaining it uses ideas from linguistics. Pronouns exist in all spoken languages that I know of for a reason. They avoid repeating obvious information in a way that reduces readability.

It may be true that the "average" Perl programmer may not know all of the magical variables by heart, but he knows that an unusual short dollar sign symbol is a magical variable. Stripping the more arcane special variables out of Perl is like decreeing that from now on no one should use the word "thou" when speaking to others.

"To every thing there is a season" (King Solomon/Pete Seeger/Crosby and McGuinn)

In reply to Re: Re^4: Determining what line a filehandle is on by sierrathedog04
in thread Determining what line a filehandle is on by Anonymous Monk

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