In the interest of obfuscation, I looked to create a nonsensical scalar, and I settled on this: q{+\//}. Much to my delight, I found that eval'ing a few of those appended together creates a large number! I worked that into a trick and was about to post it, but it fails on Windows because a different number is generated. So, at the risk of spoiling, I ask two questions:
  1. What does this do: perl -e 'print eval(+\//+\//+\//);'?
  2. And why might it behave differently on different OS's or Perl versions? Perl 5.8.0 on Solaris gives me 3338748. Perl 5.8.6 on Windows gives me 6742212.

In reply to eval'ing strange scalar by hbm

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