note
tobyink
<blockquote><p><i>"why disallow it?"</i></p></blockquote>
<p>I never meant to imply that it <em>should</em> be disallowed. I was just expressing surprise that it is not disallowed, given that Perl does place limits on what tokens may appear in a package declaration.</p>
<p>Why disallow <c>package 123</c> and <c>package 123::</c> but allow <c>package ::123</c>? The tokens allowed to follow <c>package</c> are have interesting but seemingly arbitrary restrictions, which have nothing to do with what names are actually usable for naming functions, variables, etc...</p>
<code>
use 5.010;
use strict qw( vars subs );
use warnings;
# Package name contains whitespace; sub name begins with leading colon.
*{"123 :::x"} = sub { say "hello" };
# Yet it can be called.
&{"123 :::x"};
</code>
<!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only -->
<div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-757127">
<small><small>
<tt>perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'
</tt></small></small>
</div></div>
1005846
1005867