in reply to Re: Parenthetical help
in thread Parenthetical help

Good point. The code I posted was oversimplified to isolate the issue. The original code was getting the modify time of a file and looked more like:

localtime((stat $file)[9])

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Re^3: Parenthetical help
by jwkrahn (Abbot) on Apr 04, 2011 at 19:35 UTC

    The problem is that localtime has a prototype and that prototype says that localtime's first argument, if present, must be a scalar value, so arrays and lists are converted to a scalar value so localtime can use it.

    $ perl -le'print prototype "CORE::localtime"' ;$