Re: Brain Teaser

[marcink]

Update: added <READMORE> to let others have fun too ;-)

Why does it evaluate to zero
It does not ;-) add a print "\n"; after that and you'll see.

Meaning:

print //;   # pattern-match an empty string. result: 1
print \\//; # ref to ref to variable holding 1 (1)
print \\\//; # ref to ref to ref to variable holding 1 (2)
print \\///\\\//; # print (1) / (2)

Since references return memory addresses when accessed as numbers, the last line will result in some value close to 1, just a little smaller (this is because (1) is allocated before (2)).

Anyway, that's my guess. Anyone care to point my mistakes?

-mk

[srawls]

Good job. You even got it after I forgot to write that it only returns 0 in integer context. In normal numeric context it returns something close to .9893410001 depending on your platform and whether or not you call the script from the command line with -e(the command line uses a different memory location).

The 15 year old, freshman programmer,
Stephen Rawls

[nysus]

I looked at the above answer and I'm still not sure why it parses the way it does! Interesting.

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar";
$nysus = $PM . $MCF;