Re^9: perl 5.12 BSD portability (CPAN test result)...print

[chromatic]

Without an explicit filehandle, where does the output of print $x go? How is Perl to tell the difference between "print the contents of $_ to the filehandle in $x" from "print the contents of $x to the currently selected filehandle"?

[perl-diddler]

You mean like this:

perl -e 'use P;
my $x=27;
P $x;
my $y=\*STDOUT;
P $y,"through STDOUT=%s", $x'
27
through STDOUT=27

What it can't easily do is, both:

P $x
   #and 
P STDOUT $x    #without the comma

where $x is not an object. That takes "special parsing"...but if the right prototype element was created to do that.. if not an object, then pass as a scalar), that would work too. I.e. I can get the 2nd case to work, but then the 1st case doesn't.

So is the only reason print has to be an operator is to handle printing to a <FH> w/o the comma, since the first case -- telling the difference between "$X" as a var and $x as a FH is fairly straightforward.

Note -- if you really wanted to print FROM file handle "$x", I'd have to add code for that...but if the file is open for READ/WRITE -- no way to tell.

FWIW, P does print from File handles (but not as the first arg or w/o a format statement). It reads the file handle and prints the contents as part of the output:

# perl -e 'use P;
P \*STDOUT, "Input was: %s", \*STDIN;      
'
my input
Input was: <*=my input
>