Here's an often-used, but little-remembered fact about Perl that has caused some confusion on more than one occasion: $a and $b are special. They are (among other things) used in custom sort blocks, but unfortunately the Perl documentation uses them...
Here's an often-used, but little-remembered fact about Perl that has caused some confusion on more than one occasion: $a and $b are special.
They are (among other things) used in custom sort blocks, but unfortunately the Perl documentation uses them in many examples. I say that it is unfortunate because the use strict; pragma seems to ignore these two variables. If you do the following:
use strict;
$a = "foo";
$b = "bar";
$c = "baz";
$d = "quux";
You will see that only $c and $d are flagged as errors.
My advice is to avoid using $a and $b except for custom sort blocks and other places that require their use.
