Re^11: If you believe in Lists in Scalar Context, Clap your Hands

[ysth]

Please take no offense, but your question still reads to me like "If eggs aren't utensils, how can an omelette pan be a utensil". Maybe you could try rephrasing it for the dense such as me?

[mr_mischief]

You and I both know you're not dense, so this miscommunication is probably because we're talking from different points of view.

In order to explain to someone that one can see a list assignment in scalar context without having the list in scalar context, one must often first explain that there is a difference between a syntactic list of scalars and a semantic list of values (as merlyn did pretty simply elsewhere in the thread) and you may also have to explain what that difference is.

In order to explain that the list to the left of a list assignment and the list to the right of a list assignment are both in list context and that the assignment itself is in scalar context (which is an edge case normally best left as separate statements for clarity anyway) one must explain to anyone who doesn't understand "context" not only "context" but also "operands", "side effects", and possibly "infix notation", "arity", and "associativity".

[ysth]

Thanks for taking the time to make the connections more explicit.

[mr_mischief]

I think a great deal of this thread (well, tapestry by now, with all the branches weaving together and all) is a matter of "I knew what I meant, why didn't you?"* ;-)

* If only it were that easy, lots of long threads like this would never be written.