http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=330691

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

I fount that the statement $#="%c"; has strange side effects on operations other than stringifying floating-points. For example

perl -we '$#="%c"; print ord ("k"), $/;'
Prints only a \0\n, while it should print 107\n.
perl -we 'print ord ("k"), $/;'
works correctly. Could someone tell me why is this, is this really a bug?

This affects all versions of perl on my i686-linux system, that is 5.8.1, 5.8.0, 5.6.1, 5.00503.