Re^2: conditional self-execution

[apotheon]

Nope, didn't try it -- because in Ruby, __FILE__ is a variable (or constant, or something to that effect, unless I'm grossly mistaken), and in Perl it cannot be a variable thanks to the fact there's no leading sigil. I guess maybe I should have tried it anyway, on the wild-ass guess that maybe it'd magically work somehow regardless of my apparently false assumptions.

I'd been searching for anything and everything I could think to search for that might give such information, using Google, since it didn't occur to me that there'd be a whole class of variable-like things called "special literals" in Perl.

Anyway, thanks for pointing that out.

[GrandFather]

It's the C legacy ya know ;).

[apotheon]

An entire category of entities just for three pseudo-constants, for hysterical purposes thanks to C legacy. Yeah. I think that qualifies as a wart on the language.

. . . but I still do love my Perl so. Thanks again.

[blazar]

I personally believe you may be glad to know -just for the record- that in full respect to the principle of least surprise, in Perl 6 "this kinda things" will actually be made regular variables of an appropriate namespace, with an appropriate sigil, and an appropriate twigil.

[Anonymous Monk]

actually, __FILE__ is exactly the same thing in perl: a variable, a constant, or something else.

[apotheon]

exactly the same thing in perl

When you misquote me ("something else" instead of what I actually said: "something to that effect"), that sure does seem like it's the case.

[cdarke]

__FILE__ is exactly the same thing in perl: a variable, a constant, or something else.

Except that it cannot be interpolated (not unreasonably).