I think one could correctly say that sub { @_ } returns an array. It always returns an array regardless of context.

Try pushing on to the "array" returned from your sub then:

sub return_array { @_ } 

my $new_count = push (return_array(qw( foo bar ))), 'baz';

[download]

(There's an even subtler trick related to a fundamental truth about the semantics of Perl 5 in that example, which I only realized after I chose it.)

I'm guessing that under the covers somewhere, in the sea of C, it's really true that nothing can escape a sub besides a scalar, a list, or Nothing.

The implementation is what it is to support the semantics of Perl-with-an-uppercase-P. I'm not interested in an ontological debate as to which came first, but the internals could change if p5p decided that these language semantics needed to change.

More to the point, how is any of this distinction relevant to Perl programmers?

I find that correctly understanding the semantics of a programming language has a positive effect on the quality and correctness of code written in that language.

In reply to Re^3: Evil Interview Questions by chromatic
in thread Evil Interview Questions by kyle

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