Use B::Deparse to see why

[htoug]

in reply to Surprising whitespace behavior

If you try perl -MO=Deparse you will see that the perl compiler interprets the print statement as you surmised:

my(@a) = ('a', 'b', 'c', 'def');
my $s = 'foo';
print "s=$s, a=\@  a\n";
- syntax OK

Why there is a difference between the interpretation of $ followed by whitespace and @ followed by whitespace probably lies in the fact that @-interpolation is a quite new invention (5.6 AFAICR).

-MO=Deparse is very handy for finding out why a coinstruct does what it does (and for deobfuscation).

[dragonchild]

5.005_3 had @-interpolation. I'm not sure about older Perls.

[merlyn]

probably lies in the fact that @-interpolation is a quite new invention (5.6 AFAICR).

Oh, you young'uns. {grin}

@-interpolation in a string dates back to Perl version 5.000. It's the reason that you get the fatal error when you have something like "[e-mail]".

[tye]

@-interpolation in a string dates back to Perl version 5.000.

Oh, you young'uns. (:

It dates back way before that. I've personally used @-interpolation in strings in Perl v3.

> perl4 -e "print qq<(tye@ARGV)\n>" this that
(tyethis that)

> perl4 -e "print qq<(tye@foo)\n>" this that
(tye@foo)

What changed with Perl5 was that the DWIM of optional interpolation was removed.

The only reason the second example needs to be fatal in Perl5 is so that the change in behavior was not a "silent change".

I suspect you know all of this, but your node was at least misleading so I felt clarification was in order.

[merlyn]

Oddly enough, that's what I was trying to think, but it was too early in the morning for me to remember that. I kept thinking "wasn't @foo interpolated as far back as perl 2?" But then I couldn't remember why the error was added in perl5.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm getting too old for this. {grin}