Hi morgon,

I wouldn't say it's that Perl "knows better" so much as that it's a convenience for being able to modify the data you're iterating over.

Note that, because it's only a foreach loop that acts this way, and for is this context is just an alias for the same thing, if you want the behavior you were expecting you can use the 3-arg form of a for loop: 

use strict;

my $i = "whatever";

for ($i = 1; $i <= 10; $i++) {
  last if $i == 7;
}

print "$i\n"; # prints "7" instead

[download]
And believe it or not, you could even make it a 3-arg foreach loop (which is kinda counter-intuitive, but again, "for" and "foreach" are interchangeable): 
use strict;

my $i = "whatever";

foreach ($i = 1; $i <= 10; $i++) {
  last if $i == 7;
}

print "$i\n"; # still prints "7"

[download]
say  substr+lc crypt(qw $i3 SI$),4,5

In reply to Re^3: loop surprise by golux
in thread loop surprise by morgon

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