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From: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Are only simple scalars allowed in "do SUBROUTINE (LIST)" ?
Message-ID: <1990Mar6.180823.27618@iwarp.intel.com>
Date: 6 Mar 90 18:08:23 GMT
References: <1211@frankland-river.aaii.oz.au> <7269@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> <21611@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Sender: news@iwarp.intel.com
Reply-To: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz)
Organization: Stonehenge; netaccess via Intel, Beaverton, Oregon, USA
Lines: 32
In-Reply-To: ccplumb@lion.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb)

In article <21611@watdragon.waterloo.edu>, ccplumb@lion (Colin Plumb) writes:
| 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...

I've stumbled across wanting such a syntax as well.  I think it's the
C programmer in me that would think it natural.  I've held off asking
for it because I'm afraid it would break something.  Maybe in Perl 4? :-)

Also, Colin, those last two lines should be:

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

open(C,"|uncompress");$_=<<EOF;s/../pack('C',hex($&))/ge;print C $_;
1f9d904aeacca103228c9b3774d094910302ca423620d08419b366210b05
EOF
-- 
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III      |
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