Question

I like perl the more I am getting into it but I had a question about a line I saw in a subroutine in a module I am looking through.

my $var = 1;
....
....
....
....
$var;

What throws me is just seeing that $var all by itself on a line. Is that just a roundabout way of returning 1 ?

Many thanks!

Jane

Answer 1

In perl the value of a block is the value of the last expression in the block. That is just a shorthand for return $var.

EDIT: Purists point out that that blocks in general do not return values (like they do in Scala, for example) so you can’t write:

my $x = if (cond) { 7 } else { 8 };  # wrong!

The implicit return value of a subroutine, eval or do FILE is the last expression evaluated. That last expression can be inside a block, though:

sub f {
    my $cond = shift;
    if ($cond) { 7 } else { 8 }  # successfully returns 7 or 8 from f()
}

There is the superficial appearance of the if/else blocks returning a value, even though, strictly speaking, they don’t.