Weird (?) behavior with constants under special conditions

[ceo]

Hi everyone,
I had no chance of getting PPI installed in our environment, so I wrote a small perl-parser which does kind of okay in most cases we got here. Of course, its not as mighty as PPI, but that isnt neccessary anyway. But that isnt the topic, just somekind of bad introduction.
So, I just stumbled upon this:
You can say, let's say...
use constant g => 30;
and "print g" will print "30". Allright...
So, what if you are trying to print g divided by 5?
print (g/5)
prints 6, so, it works fine.
But what if you are going to try define another constant, named s, and try to print it, divided by 5, divided by 20, divided by g?
print (s/5/20/g)
That doesnt work. It always tries to do a substition regex on $_, and I, of course, understand why.
But... is there no way to get the result of s divided by 5 divided by 20 divided by g, when s and g are constants? And is that really wanted?

[choroba]

Of course there is a way to get the result you want:

print &s/5/20/g;

As you can see, it is not wise to use operator names for constants.

[AnomalousMonk]

... it is not wise to use operator names for constants.

ceo: ... or for functions, which is what constants are:

>perl -wMstrict -le
"sub tr  (&$) { $_[0]->($_[1]) }
 sub trx (&$) { $_[0]->($_[1]) }
 ;;
 $_ = 'foo';
 print 'A: ', tr{ print qq{tr match: $_[0]} }/foo/;
 print 'B: ', trx{ print qq{trx match: $_[0]} }/foo/;
"
A: 0
trx match: 1
B: 1

[Athanasius]

It might also be worth considering a switch from constant to Readonly:

 0:24 >perl -Mstrict -MReadonly -wE "Readonly my $g => 30; Readonly my
+ $s => 3000; print $s/5/20/$g;"
1
 0:25 >

(No room for ambiguity there.)

Hope that helps,