http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=267908


in reply to question about || operator and list context

Just because I find the subject of lists and the comma operator interesting (and I'm trying to avoid real work for a few minutes):

Compare the outputs of the following assignment expressions:

sub context { print defined wantarray ? wantarray ? "list" : "scalar" : "void" , "\n"; $_[0]; } ($a, $b) = (context('a'), context('b')); print "a=[$a],b=[$b]\n\n"; ($a, $b) = (context('a'), context('b')) || die "foo"; print "a=[$a],b=[$b]\n"; list list a=[a],b=[b] void scalar a=[b],b=[]

It appears to me that in the second case the comma is acting as a scalar comma expression and not a list. Granted, || is a binary, not a unary operator, but I find the following description of context supplied in comma expressions interesting:

from the perl 5.8 perlfunc scalar() section: Because "scalar" is unary operator, if you accidentally use for EXPR a parenthesized list, this behaves as a scalar comma expression, evaluating all but the last element in void context and returning the final element evaluated in scalar context. This is seldom what you want.

Example:

$c = scalar(context('a'), context('b')); print "$c\n"; void scalar b
conv