Using perl -MO=Deparse may shed some light on some of this weirdness, although I have no idea why on Earth anyone would implement 'inf' the way it works on my box.
perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print $n[inf]'
prints
print $n[9**9**9];
as does
perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print $n["inf"]'
On the other hand,
perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print $n[-inf]'
prints
print $n[-'inf'];
perl -MO=Deparse -e 'print "", inf==0 ? "a" : "b", 'inf'==0 ? "c" : "d
+", -inf==0 ? "e" : "f"'
prints
print '', 'inf' == 0 ? 'a' : 'b', 'inf' == 0 ? 'c' : 'd', -'inf' == 0
+? 'e' : 'f';
As nearly as I can tell at the moment, inf is only equivalent 9**9**9 if it is used by itself as a subscript; it is taken as a bareword in a simple assignment, so
perl -MO=Deparse -e '$n[inf], $n[1+inf], $n[-inf] = inf'
prints
$n[9**9**9], $n[1 + 'inf'], $n[-'inf'] = 'inf';
My perl -v shows,
This is perl, v5.8.8 built for i486-linux-gnu-thread-multi
Does anyone know why?
- quester
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