Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!lion!ccplumb
From: ccplumb@lion.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Are only simple scalars allowed in "do SUBROUTINE (LIST)" ?
Message-ID: <21611@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Date: 6 Mar 90 00:27:14 GMT
References: <1211@frankland-river.aaii.oz.au> <7269@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Sender: daemon@watdragon.waterloo.edu
Reply-To: ccplumb@lion.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 21

In article <7269@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) writes:
> I also have people arguing for ('foo','bar')[$which].  Maybe.  I'm not
> done thinking about it.  It's certainly more powerful to have [] and ()
> as first class operators, but I'm not sure that such conciseness is
> always a virtue.

Well, when I wanted the time from a file, the first thing I tried was

$time = stat($file)[8];

It didn't work so well.  Then I looked for prolog-style "dummy" assignments,
as in (_,_,_,_,_,_,_,_,$time,_,_,_,_) = stat($file), and only after
failing in that did I create all those icky dummy variables to hold the
half of the stat array I don't care about.

Now that I think of it, 
$stat = stat($file);
$time = $stat[8];
might have been simpler...
-- 
	-Colin