Thanks for the kind words.

The my trick is an old one that relies on a feature of my that is not documented in perldoc -f my (though my is so ubiquitous that I suspect many people have not even read that perldoc). You see, my, like most Perl functions, has a return value. It returns variable it's declaring. That allows you to do stuff like this:

chomp(my $data = <FH>);
while ((my $foo = some_func()) eq 'bar') { ... }
[download]

You can also use it to assign values to more than one variable:

In short, were it not for this feature, Perl would lose many nifty timesavers.

Actualy, the last trick has nothing to do with the return of the my function -- an empty () would work just as well, and not effect what goes in @a at all.

---

Warning: Unless otherwise stated, code is untested. Do not use without understanding. Code is posted in the hopes it is useful, but without warranty. All copyrights are relinquished into the public domain unless otherwise stated. I am not an angel. I am capable of error, and err on a fairly regular basis. If I made a mistake, please let me know (such as by replying to this node).

Either you are mistaken or I misunderstand you.

$perl -MData::Dumper -we 'my @a = my ($x,$y,$z) = localtime;print Dump
+er \@a'

$VAR1 = [
          38,
          27,
          10
        ];
$perl -MData::Dumper -we 'my @a = () = localtime;print Dumper \@a'
$VAR1 = [];
[download]

In both cases @a is assigned the result of the ...=localtime list assignment. And as perlop says, "a list assignment in list context produces the list of lvalues assigned to". In the my() case, the lvalues are the ones returned by my(). Though there seems to be a bug here:

$perl -MData::Dumper -we 'my @a = my (undef,$y,$z) = localtime
;print Dumper \@a'
$VAR1 = [
          49,
          32,
          10
        ];
[download]

I would have expected [undef,32,10] there.

For Getopt::Long, I like to go one step further and have the defaults 'inlined'. Where Ovid wrote:

GetOptions(
...
   'verbose=i'   => \my $VERBOSE,
...
   'minimum=i'   => \my $minimum,
);
                                                                      
+         
$minimum ||= 1;
$VERBOSE ||= 0;
[download]

I like to write:

GetOptions(
...
   'verbose=i'   => \(my $VERBOSE = 0),
...
   'minimum=i'   => \(my $minimum = 1),
);
[download]