[pm-h] Interesting Blog Posts on Context & Array vs List

[Michael R. Davis]

> Personally I find context one of the most fascinating aspects of Perl 
> (Maybe someone should do a presentation!) and I must admit I've been 
> guilty of referring to things as being in "Array Context".  Does anyone 
> disagree with these postings or have any additional knowledge to share?

The only case that should not be used is caught by use warnings.  Maybe I just think in "Perl context" nowadays...

perl -Mwarnings -e ' $a =      (5,6,7); print "$a\n"' #scalar assignment of list  => 7 #never use this "feature"...
perl -Mwarnings -e '($a)=      (5,6,7); print "$a\n"' #array  assignment of list  => 5
perl -Mwarnings -e ' $a = @a = (5,6,7); print "$a\n"' #scalar assignment of array => 3
perl -Mwarnings -e '($a)= @a = (5,6,7); print "$a\n"' #array  assignment of array => 5
perl -Mwarnings -e ' $a =    @{[5,6,7]};print "$a\n"' #scalar assignment of defref anon array => 3
perl -Mwarnings -e '($a)=    @{[5,6,7]};print "$a\n"' #array  assignment of defref anon array => 5

I actually don't like the current popular practice of doing

my ($self, $a, $b, $c)=@_;

I much prefer 

my $self = shift;
my $a    = shift;
my $b    = shift;

as I can

my $self = shift;
my $a    = shift || "default";
my $b    = shift // 0;

and actually understand what I did months later.

Mike

mrdvt92 
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