Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
more useful options
 
PerlMonks  

Re^3: Perl oddities

by merlyn (Sage)
on Mar 01, 2005 at 18:24 UTC ( [id://435557]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re^2: Perl oddities
in thread Perl oddities

There's no promise in the docs that less than and greater than return 1 and 0. Just "true" and "false". It could return 37 for true, and undef for false.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^4: Perl oddities
by TimToady (Parson) on Mar 01, 2005 at 19:02 UTC
    We will try to nail those down a little better in Perl 6. Returning the null string for false was a premature optimization on my part, and a false economy (as it were), so the standard boolean operators will return 0 and 1 in Perl 6 so that when you print them out, they look like something rather than nothing. Also, since Perl 6 distinguishes boolean from numeric and string contexts, it can optimize away the actual production of a 0 or 1 value in many cases.

    That's not to say that we're ever going to require people to use 0 and 1 for boolean values. Perl 6 will be just like Perl 5 in letting you treat just about anything as a boolean value. So non-zero numbers are still true, as are strings that aren't null or "0". And maybe we can fix the "0" problem too.

Re^4: Perl oddities
by Roy Johnson (Monsignor) on Mar 01, 2005 at 18:46 UTC
    As someone who has just posted a couple of times about undocumented behavior, I will not protest too loudly about being called on this one. Still, it's a convention that has been relied on and seems unlikely to change.

    The obvious fix is:

    sub ceil { my $n = shift; int($n) + ($n > int($n) ? 1 : 0); }

    Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://435557]
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others learning in the Monastery: (4)
As of 2024-04-20 00:57 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found