From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-04-16T07:22:52+09:00
Subject: Re: translate Perl diamond operator to Ruby

On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 05:25:41AM +0900, Brian Candler wrote:
> 
> while contents = gets(nil)
>   # do stuff with contents
> end
> 
> Doing that in Perl seems quite hard.

Thanks for the information.  As for this last example, the functionality
you achieved isn't exactly "hard" in Perl, but it's a touch less
intuitive.  Slurping a file via the diamond operator should end up
looking something like this, generally:

  my $foo;
  { local $/; $foo = <>; }

The "my $foo" part, for those not familiar with Perl, is just the way
the $foo variable can be declared with lexical scope.  If you're writing
code without strict and warnings pragmas (indispensable debugging aids
in Perl), you could dispense with the "my $foo" line altogether.

In fact, you could dispense with the braces and use "undef $/" instead
of "local $/" if you prefer, as long as you don't care about getting the
original value of $/ back (or want to put it back in manually for some
reason).

TIMTOWTDI.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);