[Melbourne-pm] Perl chop behaviour

[Becky Alcorn]

Hi everyone,

I have a bit of a strange question.  Can anyone shed some light on the
behaviour of chop() when you pass it an array that contains an array.

Example code is:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my @array = (
  'fred',
  'bob',
  ['aa', 'bb'],
);

my $chr = chop(@array);

print Dumper(\@array) . "\n";
print "Char: $chr\n";

And the output from that is:

$VAR1 = [
          'fre',
          'bo',
          'ARRAY(0x812bfc0'
        ];

Char: )

I can see that it is taking the ')' from the array reference.  Is it a bug
in my version of Perl (5.8.3), or does that actually make sense at some
level?  I understand that it is a little bit difficult for Perl to decide
what to do in this case, but I didn't expect it to do that!

Cheers
Becky