Re: sort mechanism

This brings up an interesting question. Reading the Library notes on sort seem to indicate that it will return a list (of sorted values).
So, the following code does what you'd think it does: print (3, 2, 1) ? "yes" : "no";
However, if you change it to: print sort (3, 2, 1) ? "yes" : "no"; you get "no", not "yes".

Why does this behavior happen? I'm obviously not understanding something about the sort function.

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Re: Re: sort mechanism by MeowChow (Vicar) on Apr 06, 2001 at 21:54 UTC
I just bumped into this behavior when asking the confused question in Evaluation Disorder. As it turns out, sort always returns false in a scalar context, not the length of the returned list, as one might assume. MeowChow s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: sort mechanism by satchboost (Scribe) on Apr 06, 2001 at 22:01 UTC
My question then becomes where would this be documented? How would I known this without playing around? (Granted, the playing was still fun and enlightening, but that's not the point.)	[reply]
Re (tilly) 4: sort mechanism by tilly (Archbishop) on Apr 07, 2001 at 05:19 UTC
It should be documented in sort, but it is not. Probably because they didn't think up useful behaviour and didn't want to document intentionally useless behaviour. (Though I would have preferred to see fatally useless behaviour, or at least a warning... Personally I think that sort in scalar context should sort the array in place. But that is just me...	[reply]


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