in reply to useless Useless warning

C:\>perl -we"{my $pop;}" C:\>perl -we"{my $pop;$pop;}" seless use of private variable in void context at -e line 1. C:\>perl -Mdiagnostics -we"{my $pop;$pop;}" Useless use of private variable in void context at -e line 1 (#1) (W void) You did something without a side effect in a context that +does nothing with the return value, such as a statement that doesn't ret +urn a value from a block, or the left side of a scalar comma operator. V +ery often this points not to stupidity on your part, but a failure of P +erl to parse your program the way you thought it would. For example, y +ou'd get this if you mixed up your C precedence with Python precedence a +nd said $one, $two = 1, 2; when you meant to say ($one, $two) = (1, 2); Another common error is to use ordinary parentheses to construct a +list reference when you should be using square or curly brackets, for example, if you say $array = (1,2); when you should have said $array = [1,2]; The square brackets explicitly turn a list value into a scalar valu +e, while parentheses do not. So when a parenthesized list is evaluate +d in a scalar context, the comma is treated like C's comma operator, whi +ch throws away the left argument, which is not what you want. See perlref for more on this. This warning will not be issued for numerical constants equal to 0 +or 1 since they are often used in statements like 1 while sub_with_side_effects() ; String constants that would normally evaluate to 0 or 1 are warned about. C:\>

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Re^2: useless Useless warning
by aufflick (Deacon) on Jun 25, 2008 at 01:51 UTC
    Thanks - I hadn't looked at the diagnostics output.

    So really the problem is in the assumption that there is no side effect, wheras in fact there is. The side effect is that the variable is made present in a a new scope which prevents the object from being destroyed (and the destructor has side effects).

    Hm, or does it. Since I'm not assigning it to a variable the refcount won't be being increased. But surely it can't be destroyed while it's still in scope - in a void context or not...

    I'll test it out and report back.