What purpose does the Unary + have ?

from perldoc perlop
Unary "+" has no effect whatsoever, even on strings. It is useful
syntactically for separating a function name from a parenthesized
expression that would otherwise be interpreted as the complete list
of function arguments.

Unary + has no effect on its argument (it doesn't even force scalar
context on lists). It has at least three uses:

1. for anal people who have to say +123 to indicate that 123 is positive

2. to prevent parsing of a list as the sole arguments to a function
without parenthesis, compare these:

perl -le 'print (1, 2, 3, 4), " what are we fighting for"';

perl -le 'print +(5, 6, 7, 8), " open up the Perly gates"';

3. since + is not part of the set of bareword characters it forces the
parsing of a bareword as a function in hash indices

--
Chas. Owens
wonkden.net
The most important skill a programmer can have is the ability to read.

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