http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=62400


in reply to Perl is psychic?!

according to the Perl5 Pocket Ref, $& is the string matched by the last successful pattern match. Since your regex .* matches anything $& is set to that by the first line, which matches foo and that's what you print in your eval - it eval's $& and finds 'foo' there. I think... =) 
"A man's maturity -- consists in having found again the
seriousness one had as a child, at play."   --Nietzsche

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Re: (jptxs)Re: Perl is psychic?!
by MrNobo1024 (Hermit) on Mar 06, 2001 at 05:07 UTC
    Yes, but Perl dosen't set $& if you don't use it, and it was impossible to know that it would be used...
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      Whoever voted down the above node completely missed the point. MrNobo1024 is completely correct in saying that if Perl worked as documented as far back as, say, Camel 2 then it should not have had enough information to calculate $&.
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