I still think the real problem is with the behaviour of the | operator in Perl. This is one of the very few places where the difference between a string containing a number and a number makes a real difference.

With all the other numerical operations

Whoah, hold on. Where on earth did you get the idea that bitwise operations are numerical operations? They're not. Bitwise operations operate in an arithmetic fashion, yes, but they operate on sequences of bits; what the arrangement of the bits represents is not a key feature of the bitwise operation, and it is not reasonable to assume that they necessarily represent numbers. Often (perhaps even usually) they represent characters, either in ASCII or unicode. Doing a bitwise operation in strings (especially XOR or a left or right shift, but sometimes and and or an or) is quite a common operation, one that we would *not* want to have randomly break if one of the strings happens to contain digit characters by some coincidence.

Sure, if you have separate bitwise operators for working on strings versus numbers, that would be fine. In Perl6, that will work out, no problem.

But you absolutely don't want to just make the bitwise operators that we have in Perl5 magically numerify their arguments. That would be exceedingly bad. That seems to be what the person who wrote the code expected to have happen; where he came up with such an absurd idea is quite beyond me. Like I said, it took me three readings to figure out why the author expected it to work. Why it didn't work was somewhat more obvious. Figuring out why the author expected it to work took more time, significantly more time, than subsequently figuring out why his expectations were broken.

;$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}} split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$;[-1]->();print

In reply to Re: Re^2: Can you spot the problem? by jonadab
in thread Can you spot the problem? by dws

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