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kappa (294)

kappa
  (email not shown publicly)
http://kapranoff.ru/
Perl Hacker since 1998. Lives in Moscow, Russia.

Journal of kappa (294)

Thursday January 21, 2010
09:15 AM

.. & ...

[ #40116 ]

I'm publishing one of the tricky questions I ask when I interview people for Perl developer positions.

"Tell me about .. and ... operators? How are they different? How do they work in different contexts?" © skv++

Why it is a bad question: nobody (and I mean, really, nobody) ever uses these operators in scalar context. The only way to really know them is to have literally learnt all the perlop by heart. I once did it because I studied Perl offline and the information to feed upon was very scarce.

Why it is a good question: it allows me to know whether the man understands Perl contexts in 30 seconds.

IMHO, this question brings more grief than benefit so I hereby decide to ditch it. Hooray!


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  • nobody (and I mean, really, nobody) ever uses these operators in scalar context

    I'm not saying it's common, but I've certainly used those operators in scalar context.

    while (<SOMEFILE>) {
      print if 10 .. 20;
    }

    Or perhaps:

    while (<SOMEFILE>) {
      print if /START/ ... /END/;
    }

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