Re^2: Understanding arguments to subroutines

It seems like the doc is incomplete with regard to the dash character:

The => operator is a synonym for the comma except that it causes its left operand to be interpreted as a string if it begins with a letter or underscore and is composed only of letters, digits and underscores. This includes operands that might otherwise be interpreted as operators, constants, single number v-strings or function calls. If in doubt about this behavior, the left operand can be quoted explicitly.

=> treats the dash as a string, although the doc does not mention it:

use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my %h = (-v => 5);
print Dumper(\%h);
print "$h{-v}\n";

__END__

$VAR1 = {
          '-v' => 5
        };
5
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Re^3: Understanding arguments to subroutines by Corion (Patriarch) on May 14, 2012 at 14:42 UTC
I think you can explain it without a change to the documentaiton, and B::Deparse supports that: `> perl -MO=Deparse -e "print for -verbose => 2" print $_ foreach (-'verbose', 2); -e syntax OK` [download] ... and the unary minus, when applied to a string, returns "-", prepended to that string, as documented in perlop for Symbolic Unary Operators.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Understanding arguments to subroutines by toolic (Bishop) on May 14, 2012 at 14:52 UTC
Agreed. Thanks for the link to the "-" doc.	[reply]