But regardless of that, there is still the question of whether the reference returned by [] and {} should be marked readonly. I suppose it could be but Larry never thought to do so, and there doesn't seem any point in changing it now.

Dave.

> But regardless of that, there is still the question of whether the reference returned by [] and {} should be marked readonly. I suppose it could be but Larry never thought to do so,

Thanks, at least someone beside Hauke who is not trying to convince me that the issue doesn't exist at all. \o/

> and there doesn't seem any point in changing it now.

Well ... catching errors would be an issue, don't you think?

But like always with old errors, I wouldn't surprised if they became "features".

After changing, some CPAN modules might break because they did something like

sub func {
    $_[0] //= { the_default => "values" };
    ...
}
[download]

which is a broken approach to default values ...

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

(you forgot to put [1] into code-tags)

> The former is a literal value appearing in the source code and used as a compile-time constant.

Well a compile-time constant with varying refs? Looks pretty much like just another constructor like [1] to me.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dump qw/pp dd/;


use constant a => 1;
$\="\n";

print \1;   # SCALAR(0xdf00e0)
print \1;   # SCALAR(0xdef540)

print \(a); # SCALAR(0x2a19c70)
print \(a); # SCALAR(0x2a19c70)
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Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

print \1;   # SCALAR(0xdf00e0)
print \1;   # SCALAR(0xdef540)
[download]

I don't understand what of interest that's supposed to show. The first line has a compile-time literal value 1, and a run-time operator, \. The second line has another literal and op. Whether the two literals resolve to the same SV internally is entirely down to how the compiler optimises things. As it happens perl doesn't look for common shared constants.

(Also as it happens, \1 is constant-folded at compile time, in the same way that 1+2 is.)

That... is actually a pretty good example.

Run it through Deparse though, and:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dump ('pp', 'dd');
use constant ('a', 1);
$\ = "\n";
print \1;
print \1;
print \1;
print \1;
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