That's an interesting idea. Perhaps that's it after all.
I might be mis-remembering: perhaps it was the @ on the array that was optional? I'm pretty sure it was one of them, but it's been a long time since I've had Perl 4 on my computer.Update It is neither. I must have been thinking of what japhy says.
The @ and % are optional for a lot of functions: push, pop, shift, unshift, splice, keys, values, each.
Jeff japhy Pinyan,
P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.:
Perl,
regex,
and perlhacker How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart