Side discussion: why

while () { ... }
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is interpreted as

while (1) { ... }
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I can't find anything relevant in perldoc perlsyn.

$ perl -MO=Deparse -e 'while () {print "tick!\n"}'
while (1) {
    print "tick!\n";
}
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Update: Below is the deparse from perl 5.6.1. Above was 5.8.

$ perl561 -MO=Deparse -e 'while () {print "tick!\n"}'
for (;;) {
    print "tick!\n";
}
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Update 2: See more discussion in thread while ()