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From: dglo@deimos.ads.com (Dave Glowacki)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Silent Bomb
Message-ID: <11238@deimos.ADS.COM>
Date: 14 Mar 90 00:13:51 GMT
Sender: dglo@deimos.ADS.COM
Organization: Advanced Decision Systems, Mt. View, CA (415) 960-7300
Lines: 26

I converted a shell script to a perl script and spent a couple hours
trying to track down the following sort of error.  Is there any way
to get error messages from a file included via 'do'?

--------% cat stupid.pl
sub ShellCatenate {
  local($a, $b) = ('z', 'A');

  $a$b;	# supposed to be $a . $b
}
--------% perl stupid.pl
syntax error in file stupid.pl at line 4, next 2 tokens "$a$b"
Execution aborted due to compilation errors.
--------% cat mystery.pl
do 'stupid.pl';

$tmpname = &ShellCatenate;
print "TMPNAME='",$tmpname,"'\n";
print "TMPNAME='",&ShellCatenate,"'\n";
--------% perl mystery.pl
TMPNAME='2'
TMPNAME='zA'

&ShellCatenate is apparently returning the list ($a, $b).  Is this
perl's guess at what I really wanted or is it some sort of parse tree
remnant?