[sf-perl] Unusual Perl "feature"

[Joseph Brenner]

Sean Dodger Cannon <el.dodgero at gmail.com> wrote:
> Technically those aren't barewords in your example. Everything on the
> left of a => is implicitly double quotish.

Really?

  my $suffix = 'alpha';
  my %fried =
    ( name => 'okonomiyaki',
      mystery_field_$suffix => 'tonkatsu',
      );

    # Can't locate object method "mystery_field_" via package "alpha"
(perhaps you forgot to load "alpha"?) at
/home/doom/bin/testes-double_quotish_to_left_of_fat_comma line 56.



> Mark Kvale <kvale at phy.ucsf.edu> wrote:
>>  Earl Ruby wrote:
>>>
>>> I made a typo and found a new feature.
>>>
>>> I have no idea what this feature is for:
>>>
>>>> perl -e 'use strict; my $name = - "NAME"; print "$name\n"; print "Perl
>>>> prepended a minus sign to my string\n" if $name eq "-NAME";'
>>>
>>> -NAME
>>> Perl prepended a minus sign to my string
>>>
>>> Interesting behavior. Can anyone give me an example of what is this used
>>> for?
>>
>> This is documented behavior; see
>>
>> http://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#Symbolic-Unary-Operators
>>
>> My guess on use? As the man says, '-bareword is equivalent to the string
>> "-bareword"', allowing for fat comma keys without needing quotes, e.g.
>>
>> (-bareword => 1, -title => 2)