Re^2: eval'ing coderef with ampersand

That is a subtle and significant difference. What I'm really doing is forking a list of processes; and I was alarmed that one process executed when I defined the list, prior to forking.

Do you know where this is documented? I haven't seen it in perlref, my Cookbook, or elsewhere.

Thanks!

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Re^3: eval'ing coderef with ampersand by ikegami (Patriarch) on Sep 07, 2010 at 17:45 UTC
perlop says "Unary '\' creates a reference to whatever follows it." and refers you to perlref. perlref shows special that `\&handler` is the means of getting a reference to a function. `\handler` and `\handler()` are clearly not special cases, so the `\` applies to the value returned by the expressions that follows. They could be written `\( handler )` and `\( handler() )`. The behaviour of `\&handler()` is not documented, but there's only one parsing that wouldn't result in an error: `\( &handler() )`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re^3: eval'ing coderef with ampersand
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Sep 07, 2010 at 17:45 UTC

perlop says "Unary '\' creates a reference to whatever follows it." and refers you to perlref.

perlref shows special that \&handler is the means of getting a reference to a function.

\handler and \handler() are clearly not special cases, so the \ applies to the value returned by the expressions that follows. They could be written \( handler ) and \( handler() ).

The behaviour of \&handler() is not documented, but there's only one parsing that wouldn't result in an error: \( &handler() ).

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