User since: May 18, 2011 at 02:41 UTC (14 years ago) Last here: Jun 09, 2025 at 01:59 UTC (7 days ago) Experience: 7286 Level: Parson (16) Writeups: 549 Location: Ireland User's localtime: Jun 16, 2025 at 01:21 UTC Scratchpad: View For this user: Search nodes

Illuminating facts about Perl: (work in progress)

• PDL Team Members (the people behind just one namespace on CPAN)
• There is no Perl Illuminati

Illuminating perlmonks nodes: (work in progress)

• tobyink's answer to What does "! !" do?
• The flip-flop operator as explained by Grandfather

Favourite Larry Wall quote:

Part of what's confusing the issue is that DESTROY is a verb. It was done that way by analogy to FETCH and STORE, but the use of a verb is unfortunate, in retrospect. I should have named it something like YOU_ARE_ABOUT_TO_BE_SHOT_DO_YOU_HAVE_ANY_LAST_WORDS.

Just as an object oriented design will often separate initializers from constructors, it will also separate finalizers from destructors. DESTROY is designed to be a destructor that can call a finalizer, but to confuse it with a finalizer would be, er, confusing.