Dear monks,

Some of you already know the golf way to add up a column of numbers.

perl -nle '$t+=$_}{print$t'
[download]

This works because perlrun promises the -n option translates the code to

LINE: while(<>) { 
  perl -nle '$t+=$_}{print$t
}
[download]

(There's actually some tricks how this can be golfed even more, but those are irrelevant for my question so best not to show here.)

So now I tried to do something like that and typed

perl -wnE '$s+=$_}{say$s'
[download]

It failed. The error message is

Can't call method "say" without a package or object reference at -e li
+ne 1, <> line 2.
[download]

When instead I typed

perl -wnE '$s+=$_;END{say$s}'
[download]

It's not hard to guess what happens here: -E enables new features only in the first block, not in the second. This seems contrary to perlrun which says:

-E commandline

behaves just like -e, except that it implicitly enables all optional features (in the main compilation unit). See feature.

Modeparse confirms my suspicion:

$ perl -MO=Deparse -wnE '$s+=$_}{say$s'
[download]

BEGIN { $^W = 1; }
LINE: while (defined($_ = <ARGV>)) {
    BEGIN {
        $^H{'feature_say'} = q(1);
        $^H{'feature_state'} = q(1);
        $^H{'feature_switch'} = q(1);
    }
    $s += $_;
}
{
    $s->say;
}
-e syntax OK
$
[download]

So my question is, is this a bug or a feature or a documentation bug?

Update 2010-07-08: it seems that this is fixed in perl 5.10.1.