Erez, I guess I agree with the first part of your post regarding "default variables" having a correlation to or derivation from pronouns. That is the standard wisdom and I have accepted it without much thought; the etymology of $_ has never seemed important enough to question. I would say that is just a fact that I collected. Whether it really is a fact, I don't know.

The point I was making had nothing to do with default variables or pronoun-like tokens needing nearby antecedents. Nearby antecedents in language correlate to not acting at a distance in programming; these seem very different somehow.

$_ is the accumulator of Perl; an ordinary pronoun needs an antecedent while $_ more often needs local-ization to break it away from its prior value. Between the two, the confusion we might get feels very similiar, but the mentation we should apply is inverted in some way.

Be well
rir

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.