Re: [Fun With Perl] What does this do?

[Ronald J Kimball <rjk@linguist.dartmouth.edu>]

On Wed, Jun 16, 1999 at 05:55:14PM +0300, Ariel Scolnicov wrote:
> mjd-list-fwp@plover.com writes:
> 
> > Some time ago I was surprised by this.  See if you can guess what it
> > prints *before* you try it out.
> > 
> >         print "\L\uHELLO, WORLD\E.\n";
> 
> OK, I failed.
> 
> **************** SPOILERS AHEAD ****************
> 
> 
> > If you're not surprised, you're either missing something important or
> > you're a toke.c expert.  (Or you've seen it before.)
> 
> Is it an evaluation order thing?  Or am I _still_ missing something
> important?
> 
> Interestingly (but hopefully not because I'm missing something),
> "\L\UHELLO, WORLD\E.\n" is a syntax error.
> 

And so is this:

% perl -e 'print "\L\u\UHELLO, WORLD\E.\n"'
syntax error at -e line 1, near "\u\L\U"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.


Apparently perl actually rearranges the characters to put \u and \l before
\U and \L.

I had no idea.


Ronald

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