Assigning anonymous hash to a list

[Uri Guttman]

On 07/30/2013 06:52 PM, Joseph Werner wrote:
> Hmmm.  Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes, I recognize, Abigail I do not (perhaps
> I should?)
>
> So, Yitzchak, is this, in fact, a simple matter of operator precedence
> in that the ',' operator is of lower precedence than the assignment
> operator (absurd though that may seem)  AND not a case of a scalar
> value (which is the result of a Perl expression involving a ','
> operator) being offered to a  list assignment?

perldoc perlop shows the comma op has very low precedence. it allows for 
this:

$foo = 1, $bar = 2 ;

that does what you think it does, 2 assignments. the example in question 
breaks into 2 expressions connected by a comma (assignment in perl is 
still just an expression). the left expression does the assignment and 
the right expression has nowhere to go (hence its void context). as 
others (abigail too) have shown, warnings will catch useless data in 
void context.

so parens around the right side changes where the comma binds to just 
inside the parens. now it assigns that list to the LHS list. note that 
the comma is now a list separator and not the scalar comma op.

so this is absolutely a precedence issue and nothing else. the key is 
that assignment binds tighter than the comma. your eyes may say 
otherwise but perl (and abigail) knows better! :)

thanx,

uri


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