Re: NEWBIE Brain Teaser #2, by nysus

[koolade]

This was a good exercise. My biggest hurdle was figuring out why $_ held the value 2 and @_ contained qw(nothing nothing) rather than qw(alpha omega). After a bit of searching I think I found the answer.

I tracked down information on the qw operator and found this in the perlop manpage:

qw// is exactly equivalent to split(' ', q/STRING/); This equivalency means that if used in scalar context, you'll get split's (unfortunate) scalar context behavior...

So read the documentation on split and found:

If not in list context, returns the number of fields found and splits into the @_ array.

So is that pretty much answer? Is there any more magic to it?

[Eureka_sg]

I believe that qw// no longer use split in 5.6. Instead, it's using the comma-operator. As a result, you are just trying to assign a list to a scalar. Thus, $_ will just hold 'nothing' and the answer for part c is "In the beginning there was alpha, in the end there will be omega."

Disclaimer: I don't have 5.6 installed, so the above is pure speculation. Pls correct me if I'm wrong. : )

[nysus]

Actually, with version 5.005, the script yields: "In the beginning there was nothing, in the end there will be nothing."