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From: raymond@sunkist.berkeley.edu (Raymond Chen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: formats inside an eval
Message-ID: <1990Mar21.073635.25523@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 21 Mar 90 07:36:35 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Reply-To: raymond@math.berkeley.edu (Raymond Chen)
Organization: U.C. Berkeley
Lines: 31

My perl man page says

eval EXPR
	EXPR ... is executed in the context of the current perl program,
	so that any variable settings, subroutine or format definitions 
	remain afterwards.

Now everybody uses eval for dynamic variable settings and subroutines,
so I figured, hey, why not dynamic formats?

% cat foo
eval "format =
An on-the-fly format.
.
";
print "Error: $@\n";
% perl foo				(Patchlevel 12)
Error: syntax error in file (eval) at line 2, next 2 tokens "=
An"

Changing "format =" to "format STDOUT =" didn't seem to help any.

The usual concluding sentences:
  Am I doing something wrong?
  If I'm not in error, has this been fixed in a recent patch?

sub _{print shift;"&_('@_')";}$"="','";$_=&_(split(//,"Not another perl hacker,"));$_=eval while!/''/;
--
raymond@math.berkeley.edu   "And perl pulls ahead of C, but APL still has
                             a commanding lead..." --- play-by-play of the
                            `Most closely approximates line noise' competition