Bug#810156: scalar of hashes not documented

[積丹尼 Dan Jacobson]

>>>>> "NT" == Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org> writes:

>> perldoc -f scalar makes absolutely no mention of what we see (/) here:
>> $ perl -wle '$h{a}=0; print scalar %h;'
>> 1/8

NT> It doesn't explain what happens when you evaluate an array in scalar
NT> context either, and I don't think it should.

Well at least it has an example.

                @counts = ( scalar @a, scalar @b, scalar @c );

NT> However, perldata.pod has this paragraph under "Scalar values":

NT>     If you evaluate a hash in scalar context, it returns false if
NT>     the hash is empty. If there are any key/value pairs, it returns
NT>     true; more precisely, the value returned is a string consisting
NT>     of the number of used buckets and the number of allocated buckets,
NT>     separated by a slash. This is pretty much useful only to find out
NT>     whether Perl's internal hashing algorithm is performing poorly on
NT>     your data set. For example, you stick 10,000 things in a hash, but
NT>     evaluating %HASH in scalar context reveals "1/16", which means only
NT>     one out of sixteen buckets has been touched, and presumably contains
NT>     all 10,000 of your items. This isn't supposed to happen. If a tied
NT>     hash is evaluated in scalar context, the "SCALAR" method is called
NT>     (with a fallback to "FIRSTKEY").

NT> which should be quite enough IMO.

Sounds good. OK

$ perldoc -f scalar|tail -n 4

            See perlop for more details on unary operators and the comma
            operator.

should also say

            See perldata for details on evaluating a hash in scalar contex.