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From: allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: $# question
Message-ID: <1990Nov23.184701.11478@NCoast.ORG>
Date: 23 Nov 90 18:47:01 GMT
References: <LTaVs1w163w@cybrspc>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR)
Followup-To: comp.lang.perl
Organization: North Coast Public Access *NIX, Cleveland, OH
Lines: 49

As quoted from <LTaVs1w163w@cybrspc> by roy%cybrspc@cs.umn.edu (Roy M. Silvernail):
+---------------
| $#foo, in this case, will be 4, and therin lies the confusion. The array is
| obviously 5 elements long. Wouldn't $# make more sense if it were to
| point to the array element _past_ the last element assigned? (i.e. to
| the null element past '5' in the above example) Then it could be used
| directly as an indication of size, and as well, you could do
+---------------

Using $# usually means you aren't doing it the Perl way.  To wit:

+---------------
| while (<instream>) {
|         @foo[$#foo] = $_;
| }
+---------------

while (<instream> {
    push(@foo);
}

is faster and easier to read (once you're used to Perl, at least):  "while you
can get something from <instream>, push it onto array `foo'".

+---------------
| It's possible that this has been addressed in later patch-levels, but
| until PL41 comes around for DOS, I'm stuck at PL18. [ :-( ]
+---------------

I think it's been as it is since Perl v1; as a result, it's a bit late to
change it.  I suspect a large number of scripts would break resoundingly.

+---------------
| (not-quite-related question: how does one unlink() a file not in the
| current directory? I've tried explicit pathnames with both / and \ as
| separators, but to no avail)
+---------------

Have you tried doubling the \?  Remember that \ is meaningful to Perl as an
escape character, so to get one into a string you must say something like
'\\dos\\command.com'.  (I assume the MS-DOS version of Perl doesn't use the
old MS-DOS v1.25 calls!)

++Brandon
-- 
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