in reply to Re^3: Maintaining context of the caller
in thread Maintaining context of the caller

The line of code is assignment to a conditional, but the values are not either both scalar or both list values. The Camel quote explaines that that is not an acceptable thing to do.
Funny, and here I thought the error message "Assignment to both a list and a scalar" explaiend why it wasn't an acceptable thing to do.
  • Comment on Re^4: Maintaining context of the caller

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^5: Maintaining context of the caller
by GrandFather (Saint) on Jul 04, 2005 at 22:03 UTC

    It does if you realise that that is what is happening in the context of a conditional. From OP's parenthetical comment it is fairly clear that this particular subtlety of Perl (and Perl has a lot of them) had escaped OP.

    I thought it worth making clear that there is no syntactic sugar that will allow OP to select a list or scalar context at run time for the call by using the conditional operator in that particular fashion.

    Perl is Huffman encoded by design.
[reply]
      it is fairly clear that this particular subtlety of Perl (and Perl has a lot of them) had escaped OP

      Indeed, that's true. I included the parenthetical remark to head off any suggestions that the problem was caused by precedence. Since I had ruled that out, I obviously didn't think that was the problem, but I didn't investigate enough to find out what it was. I just assumed it was something Perl wouldn't allow. Your quoted snippet cleared up the exact reason, and I appreciate it.

[reply]
Re^5: Maintaining context of the caller
by ysth (Canon) on Jul 04, 2005 at 22:13 UTC
    Funny, and here I thought the error message "Assignment to both a list and a scalar" explaiend why it wasn't an acceptable thing to do.
    No, that lets you know that it's not an acceptable thing to do. The perldiag entry explains why that's so.
[reply]
      My confusion is explained and all is right with the world.
[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom