OT: Perl syntax Question

[John Macdonald]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 11:03:19AM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 10:52:13AM -0400, Joseph Kubik wrote:
> > What does the following mean?
> > 
> > ($#{$reg->{'sale'}{'items'}} == -1)
> > 
> > As, in, What does $#{} really do?
> 
> $# = $OFMT, which is some weird deprecated perl thing that shouldn't be
> used anymore, because printf is a much more sane way to do things.
> 
> Or so says the camel book.

Unfortunately, the expression {$reg...-1} following $#
means that this is not the scalar variable named $# whose
description you quote that is being used.

Just as the statement:

    $x{'a'} = $x;

refers to the array @x on the left side and the totally distinct
scalar variable $x on the right side.  (Well, a guru could
quibble about the word totally, but for the purposes of this
discussion, it is accurate enough.)

The other replies, gaving the meaning as the index
of the last element of the array whose reference is in
$reg->{'sale'}{'items'} (or -1 if there are no elements in
that array) were correct.

-- 
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml