Question

I recently came across the following code snippet

$count_stuff{$_}++ for @stuff;

It’s a pretty convenient way to use a hash to count occurrences of strings in an array for example. I understand how it works, but not why it works. I can not find the documentation for this way of using for.

Why does it work? And where is the documentation?

Answer 1

It is documented in the “perlsyn” man page, under Statement Modifiers (which talks about the postfix syntax) and under Foreach Loops (which explains that “for” and “foreach” are synonyms).