Oops, wrong language

[afuna_archive]

Damn. PHP also uses @$. First thing I thought when I saw it was, "Oh neat, it's dereferencing an array reference." Then I realized a) the variable on the LHS wasn't an array, and b) I was in the wrong language.

(It's used for error control instead, which is also neat in its own way, I guess.)

Comments

[ciaran-h.livejournal.com]

PHP makes me go :(.

[pauamma]

At least, PHP doesn't consider @$@ to mean something. :-)

[afuna]

...okay. I give up. What does it mean? :)

[pauamma]

From perldoc perlvar:

       $@      The Perl syntax error message from the last eval() operator.
               If $@ is the null string, the last eval() parsed and executed
               correctly (although the operations you invoked may have failed
               in the normal fashion).  (Mnemonic: Where was the syntax error
               "at"?)

(and @ is the array dereference)

[pauamma]

(Yes, you can actually assign an arrayref to $@. I tried.)

[afuna]

Oh interesting. Have you ever used it? *curious* (And not just to test ;p)

[pauamma]

I have used $@ in code meant to Do Something Useful, but not to store an arrayref in it. You can pass a blessed reference to die inside an eval, which would set $@ to that reference, but blessed references are usually hashrefs (or pseudohash refs a la fields::phash), not arrayrefs.

[afuna]

"pass a blessed reference to die inside an eval"
Something about these words together makes me think of a video game :-)

And hmmm. *nods thoughtfully*

[afuna]

Hee. It's somewhat simple and easy to learn which means there's a *lot* of bad code out there written by people who don't know better, but I don't find PHP itself that bad.