use Perl

• But it's ambiguous... (Score:1)

  by mauzo (8185) on 2007.10.15 22:53 (#58381)

  my @x;
  undef @x;
  
  my $x = [];
  undef @$x;
  undef $x;

  Personally I think I'd prefer the syntax $a{foo}[] for @{ $a{foo} }; that might even be backwards-compatible. Of course, the heuristic that the parser uses to check the sigils would need completely changing, which would be a nasty job, and you lose the human-heuristic that 'if it starts with @ it's multiple-valued' which was the whole point of the multiple deref operators in the first place.

  Reply to This

  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Aristotle (5147)

    undef @$x;

    Good catch – if you need to dereference a ref without using a [] or {} indexing operation, you need the @{} bracket. I guess that explains the ugly new syntax in Perl 6.

    I guess ${} is always necessary by the same token.

    All in all, not the majority of cases.