I wasn't commenting on your perl usage in any way -- in {;} the semicolon does make it clear that it is not supposed to be a hashref.

I was just making a dumb point of comparing it to set logic, where if you have a set w/nothing in it, then there's something in it.

In set logic, there's the EmptySet which I'll represent as 0. 0 is {}. So a set {} is the empty set. A set {1,2,3} has 3 elements in it and is non-empty. The set { 0 } is also non-empty, even though its only element is the empty set.

So the parallel i had in my mind was something like this:

Perl	Set Logic	Description
{} (or ;)	{} (or 0)	Emtpy set/statement
{;}	{ 0 }	A set containing the empty set; therefore non-empty

I guess you could use the exampe of /dev/null -- that's really a nothing file, but the array @f = ( '/dev/null' ) is non-empty. Blah--now that i typed it, i don't like that example.

Anyways, i'll stop rambling now.. ;)