Re: Can you create *real* global variables?

[moodster]

The only global variables that I know of are the one's created by perl, and they tend to be magical (e.g $! yields the current value of errno when in a numerical context, and an error message in a string context).

I'm having a cold and my brain is only operating at half speed right now, so maybe I'm just confused. But I always thought that variables lived either in scalar or list context. Are there such beasts as numerical and string contexts as well?

Cheers,
-- moodster

[blazar]

I'm having a cold and my brain is only operating at half speed right now, so maybe I'm just confused. But I always thought that variables lived either in scalar or list context. Are there such beasts as numerical and string contexts as well?

Indeed in Perl 5 (and earlier), as opposed to Perl 6, there is no precise notion of numerical or string contexts. However those terms are sometimes loosely used to indicate "used as a number" and "used as a string respectively": in some cases, but by no means in all of them, there's an actual difference.