Auto-incrementing strings in for loops

JadeNB has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

It seems to me that the first and second code paragraphs below should behave identically, and the third should behave nearly identically (except that it increments only once). As shown, the behaviour is quite different (on Perl 5.10.1 and, with the obvious modification, Perl 5.8.9). Am I missing something obvious?

$_ = 'a';
$_++ and say; # => 'b'
$_++ and say; # => 'c'

$_ = 'a';
$_++ and say for 1..2; # => '2', '3'

$_ = 'a';
$_++ and say for 1; # => Modification of a read-only value attempted
[download]

UPDATE: Oops, for aliases $_, so I'm not ~~aliasing~~ incrementing the $_ that I think I'm ~~aliasing~~ incrementing. Sigh, sorry ….

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Re: Auto-incrementing strings in for loops by colwellj (Monk) on Nov 20, 2009 at 04:12 UTC
Jade, it seems to me that for part 2 you are 'say'ing the for loop and thus $_ will be the constant 1 then 2. For part three perhaps perl is compiling 'for 1' to be just '1 ' and thus you are attempting to $_++ a constant ('1')?	[reply]
Re^2: Auto-incrementing strings in for loops by ikegami (Patriarch) on Nov 20, 2009 at 04:47 UTC
No. The `for` has the lowest of priorities. `$_++ and say for 1..2;` [download] is not equivalent to `$_++ and ( say for 1..2 );` [download] That's not even legal. The original statement is indeed equivalent to `( $_++ and say ) for 1..2;` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Auto-incrementing strings in for loops by JadeNB (Chaplain) on Nov 20, 2009 at 04:19 UTC
it seems to me that for part 2 you are 'say'ing the for loop and thus $_ will be the constant 1 then 2. Thanks for your thoughts, but the parsing you suggest is not quite right: `$ perl5.10 -MO=Deparse,-p -E 'say for 1..2' BEGIN { $^H{'feature_say'} = q(1); $^H{'feature_state'} = q(1); $^H{'feature_switch'} = q(1); } ; say($_) foreach (1 .. 2); -e syntax OK` [download] That is, `say for ...` is understood as `say($_) for ...`. The problem is, unfortunately, much sillier than that: `for` aliases `$_`, so I wasn't incrementing the variable that I thought I was incrementing!	[reply] [d/l] [select]