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POIs this a bug with Perl's glob prototype?
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copied!<p>For no particular reason, I was playing around with the glob prototype <code>(*)</code>, and seeing what it would do when the argument is a defined subroutine.</p> <p>Given the following code:</p> <pre><code>sub test (*) {print "[@_]\n"} sub blah ($) {"blah got @_"} </code></pre> <p>If you write <code>test blah;</code> you get the syntax error <code>Not enough arguments for main::blah...</code></p> <p>If you write <code>test blah 1;</code> the program compiles and prints <code>[blah]</code></p> <p>If you write <code>test blah die;</code> the program compiles, prints <code>[blah]</code> and does NOT die.</p> <p>If you write <code>test blah(1);</code> the program compiles and prints <code>[blah got 1]</code></p> <p>If you write <code>test blah(die);</code> the program compiles and then dies.</p> <p>The last two examples are clearly an application of the "if it looks like a subroutine call it is a subroutine call` rule. </p> <p>However, the parenthesis-less examples seem like a bug to me. Because what seems to be happening is that despite being in glob context, the parser still treats <code>blah</code> as a prototyped function that requires an argument. But when compilation is said and done, the argument to <code>blah</code> is completely thrown away, and the string <code>'blah'</code> is instead passed to <code>test</code>.</p> <p>Here is an example of the <code>test blah die;</code> construct run through <code>B::Deparse</code>:</p> <pre><code>$ perl -MO=Deparse,-p -e 'sub test (*) {print "[@_]\n"} sub blah ($) {"blah got @_"} test blah die;' sub test (*) { print("[@_]\n"); } sub blah ($) { "blah got @_"; } &test('blah'); -e syntax OK </code></pre> <p>So as you can see, the <code>die</code> is completely dropped from the op-tree.</p> <p>So my question is if others consider this behavior a bug? Is the behavior documented anywhere? If it is a bug, is it worth fixing?</p>

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