What's the meaning of plain string when using as condition?

Question

Below perl one-liner outputs hello to console, so how is false interpreted here since it is not a variable or literal string?

perl -e"if (false) {print 'hello'}"

`use warnings;` or `perl -we "if (false) {print 'hello'}"` – mpapec Jan 23 '15 at 06:15 — mpapec, Jan 23 '15 at 06:15

Hameed · Answer 1 · 2015-01-23T06:16:00.453

5

In Perl false is true. The only terms that are evaluated as false are:

0, '0', '', (), (''), undef

FALSE/TRUE are not boolean values. They are called barewords and with use strict;, it will not even run.

edited Jan 23 '15 at 06:16

answered Jan 23 '15 at 06:09

Hameed

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 23 '15 at 06:24

4

Barewords

A word that has no other interpretation in the grammar will be treated as if it were a quoted string. These are known as "barewords".

answered Jan 23 '15 at 06:24

Michael Burr

2 Answers2