How can you find the sum of an array using just shift and pop?
Please, check your last post. Help with arrays
Moreover, your code die with several errors. Please, use warnings and strict
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Also check the following Up:
push, pop, shift, unshift

How can you find the sum of an array using just shift and pop?

There are two key points to grasp:

1. shift not only gives the vaue of the first element of the array, it also removes it, reducing the size of the array by one. Likewise, pop not only gives the value of the last element of the array, it also removes, it, reducing the size of the array by one.

2. A while loop continues until its condition becomes false. while ( @nums ) { ... } contines to loop until @nums is false. When does this happen? Well, in this case @nums is in scalar context, so its value is the size of the array. As long as the array contains elements, this size is greater than zero, and Perl interprets any non-zero numerical value as “true”. But when the last element is removed, the size of the array falls to zero, a value which Perl interprets as “false”, so the loop ends.

Put these two points together, and the question is easily solved.

Hope that helps,

The usual and most readable way is this:

use v5.14;
my @nums = (1,2,3,4);
say do{local($_,$.);$_+=pop(@nums)*!!++$. while@nums;$_/$.};
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You can randomly use pop and shift to remove elements one at a time from either end of your array and add them to the sum, doing this in a loop while there are still elements in the array. However, this obviously destroys your array.

$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E '
> my @arr = ( 1 .. 10 );
> my $sum;
> $sum += int rand 2 ? shift @arr : pop @arr while @arr;
> say $sum;
> say qq{-> @arr <-};'
55
->  <-
$
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If, on the other hand, you wish to preserve your array, do the same thing in an on-the-fly subroutine with your array as the argument, which is passed into the subroutine as the @_ array (see perlvar and perlsub). The pop and shift functions inside a subroutine operate on @_ by default, leaving your @arr array untouched.

$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E '
> my @arr = ( 1 .. 10 );
> my $sum = sub {
>    my $sum;
>    $sum += int rand 2 ? shift : pop while @_;
>    return $sum;
>    }->( @arr );
> say $sum;
> say qq{-> @arr <-};'
55
-> 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 <-
$
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I hope this is helpful.

Update: Clarified the wording a little.