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From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: $! and string context
Message-ID: <8730@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 15 Jul 90 05:32:06 GMT
References: <1990Jul13.175014.1750@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU> <15668@bfmny0.BFM.COM>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 18

In article <15668@bfmny0.BFM.COM> tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
: In article <1990Jul13.175014.1750@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU> worley@compass.com writes:
: >People might be interested to note that the conditional expression in
: >an 'if' is a string context, which I didn't expect.  The
: >string/numeric context difference seems to usually be unimportant, but
: >$! is an exception:
: >
: >	die "Can't do ..." if $!;
: 
: Try using the standard workaround for this sort of thing:
: 
: 	dir "Can't do ..." if 0+$!;

That's fine as a workaround.  However, I'll make it so that if errno
is 0, it returns the null string in a string context.  Then the boolean
value will be unsurprising.

Larry