Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!know!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jpl-devvax!lwall
From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: A gripe about catching programming errors in Perl
Message-ID: <10129@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 27 Oct 90 06:43:10 GMT
References: <8974@cognos.UUCP>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 27

In article <8974@cognos.UUCP> alanm@cognos.UUCP (Alan Myrvold) writes:
: Recently, I wrote a bit of a perl script that looked something
: like this:
: 
:     open(oct,"< October");
:     while (<oct>) {
:        print;
:     }
: 
: Even though the file October exists, nothing was printed.  This
: is due to my choice of oct as a filehandle, since oct is a built-in
: function.
: 
: Why couldn't I have at least gotten a warning during the compile?
: With perl's big collection of functions, I can't be the only one
: making mistakes like this.  Is it ever proper to use a function name
: where a file handle is expected?

Yes, it is.  The above converts the octal value found in $_ to a decimal
value, then uses that number as the filehandle.  Why you'd want to do
that is beyond me, but it's perfectly legal--the first argument of
open can be any expression yeilding a filehandle.

The manual suggests you use upper case for filehandles and labels.  There
is a REASON for that...

Larry