note
JadeNB
<p>I was ignorantly cut-and-pasting; thanks for clarifying why the idiom is useful for [mod://ExtUtils::MakeMaker] but not for most uses.</p>
<p>I considered mentioning the quotes, but didn't, because I thought that Perl determined the ‘purpose’ of a scalar when it was used, not when it was created. As you point out, I was wrong:
<code>
$ perl -MDevel::Peek -e 'Dump "0.08"; Dump 0.08'
SV = PV(0x80306c) at 0x800cc0
REFCNT = 1
FLAGS = (POK,READONLY,pPOK)
PV = 0x205700 "0.08"\0
CUR = 4
LEN = 8
SV = NV(0x812e00) at 0x800c6c
REFCNT = 1
FLAGS = (NOK,READONLY,pNOK)
NV = 0.08
</code></p>
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