Look at the following snippet. 

perl -e 'open strict, ">&", STDOUT or die; use strict; print strict fo
+obar, "\n";'

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This prints foobar so clearly foobar is interpretted as a bareword. However, we use strict, so that should disallow barewords. Why is this? (The title of the post can give a hint.)

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Re: A feature of use
by ambrus (Abbot) on Aug 20, 2008 at 19:57 UTC

    In fact, even this works. 

    perl -e 'if (0) { open strict; } use strict; print STDOUT foobar, "\n"
+;'

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Re: A feature of use
by jdalbec (Deacon) on Aug 20, 2008 at 22:45 UTC
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      Ah, you gave me enough clues...
      use strict is turned into require strict; which loads the module, followed by strict->import;. But Perl now knows strict as a filehandle, so this syntax is treated as an object method call to the filehandle object associated with the filehandle with the name "strict".

      Since either there is a method for the package IO::Handle (or else, import has a special status so perl won't complain if it can't find it), it works but actually doesn't do much. What it definitely doesn't do is call import for the package strict. That's why strict checks are still off.

      So it's all caused by the ambiguous syntax of word->method, which may represent either a class method call, or an object method call.

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Re: A feature of use
by ambrus (Abbot) on Jul 18, 2016 at 09:34 UTC
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