Well I'm definately not at the wizard/god level, but I think I might know what's really going on. It's up to others to call it a bug or not.

I threw this in a debugger to see what exactly happens where. With this code..

my @ary=split(" ",$_) while (<DATA>);
print "@ary";
__DATA__
These are words
These are more words
[download]

I set a breakpoint upon reaching the suspect line. When it hits the line, the my variable @ary is created. It's empty. This is done before the evaluation of the expression. Unfortunately the debugger I was using won't show the reiteration of that line. But needless to say, when I stepped off that line, @ary was still empty.

Next, I used

my @ary;
@ary=split(" ",$_) while (<DATA>);
print "@ary";
__DATA__
These are words
These are more words
[download]

I set the breakpoint on the my declaration. As before, when I hit that line, @ary was created. When I left the line, it contained the last line of text, each word in an array element.

What that information, here's my opinion:

Each time the line in question is accessed, @ary is redeclared (blank). This even happens when the line is executed just for <DATA> to return false. So the last iteration redeclares @ary, there's no more DATA and the program moves on.

Is that a bug? I'll let someone else answer that :)

Rich

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