From the "learn something new every day" department: Going through some of my company's source code, I stumbled upon a weird method of using a regex:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $test = 'aba';
print "Good\n" if $test =~ ab;
[download]

Yup, it prints "Good" with no warnings, no problem with a bareword (ActiveState 5.005 and 5.6). Where the heck is this documented? I've never seen a "bare" regex like that. I wonder if there are any problems with this, so long as it's a simple regex ($test =~ ^aba$; fails, for example)?

Cheers,
Ovid

Update: After a fair amount of discussion in the chatterbox, it was agreed that this is definitely a bug for two reasons:

• The behavior is inconsistent amongst different versions of Perl and on different operating systems.
• strict should catch an error on the bareword.

Because of this, and because no one could find this documented either as a feature or a bug, a bug report was submitted.

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