Strange name

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

Why does the execution of the following program output "TRUE"? I expected an error indicating that TRUE was undefined.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use strict;

print TRUE."\n";
[download]

edited: Thu May 29 20:51:55 2003 by jeffa - code tags

Comment on Strange name Download Code

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Re: Strange name by broquaint (Abbot) on May 29, 2003 at 16:58 UTC
Since all barewords in `perl` are essentially strings, and you're forcing stringification with the concatenation, this behaviour is to be expected e.g `shell> perl -MO=Deparse -Mstrict -Mwarnings -e 'print TRUE."\n";' print 'TRUE' . "\n"; -e syntax OK` [download] HTH `_________ broquaint`	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Strange name by boo_radley (Parson) on May 29, 2003 at 17:11 UTC
perl (and strict) doesn't recognize `TRUE` as a variable (it has no sigil), but as a literal, which perl recognizes as plain text.	[reply]