Proposed patch to perlvar.pod

[email protected] ("A. Sinan Unur")
Newsgroups perl.perl5.porters
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hello:

There was recent discussion on Stackoverflow.com regarding where to
find documentation for $# (see
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2997042/ ). The poster was actually
looking for information regarding the $#ary to get the last index of
@ary. He expected the documentation to be in perlvar.pod when it
actually is in perldata.pod.

Given that the builtin variable $# was removed with 5.10.0, there no
longer is an entry in perlvar.pod for $#. The attached patch inserts
an entry into perlvar.pod for $# which points out that $# no longer
exists and the user should consult perldata.pod for the $#ary usage.

The patch file was generated on a Windows system from blead. I am
afraid permissions may have been messed up.

Thank you for your attention.

Sinan
-- 
A. Sinan Unur
http://www.unur.com/sinan/
0001-It-may-not-be-obvious-to-a-new-Perl-programmer-that-.patch (application/octet-stream, 996 B)
From 09b9d7bc8167d94e09088167cdea43750c337f80 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Sinan Unur <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 2010 18:53:27 -0400
Subject: [PATCH] It may not be obvious to a new Perl programmer that $#ary is explained
 in perldata.pod (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2997042/ ).

A possible solution is to place an entry in perlvar.pod pointing out
that $# was removed and pointing the user to perldata.pod for the
explanation of $#ary usage.
---
 pod/perlvar.pod |    5 +++++
 1 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

diff --git a/pod/perlvar.pod b/pod/perlvar.pod
index ed90610..539cc2c 100644
--- a/pod/perlvar.pod
+++ b/pod/perlvar.pod
@@ -553,6 +553,11 @@ taken for something more important.)
 Consider using "real" multidimensional arrays as described
 in L<perllol>.
 
+=item $#
+X<$#>
+
+C<$#> was removed in Perl 5.10.0. See L<perldata/"Variable names"> for C<$#ary> usage.
+
 =item HANDLE->format_page_number(EXPR)
 
 =item $FORMAT_PAGE_NUMBER
-- 
1.7.0.4
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