Can Anybody Please Explain (my $self = Shift) In Perl
Answer : First off, a subroutine isn't passed the @ARGV array. Rather all the parameters passed to a subroutine are flattened into a single list represented by @_ inside the subroutine. The @ARGV array is available at the top-level of your script, containing the command line arguments passed to you script. Now, in Perl, when you call a method on an object, the object is implicitly passed as a parameter to the method. If you ignore inheritance, $obj->doCoolStuff($a, $b); is equivalent to doCoolStuff($obj, $a, $b); Which means the contents of @_ in the method doCoolStuff would be: @_ = ($obj, $a, $b); Now, the shift builtin function, without any parameters, shifts an element out of the default array variable @_ . In this case, that would be $obj . So when you do $self = shift , you are effectively saying $self = $obj . I also hope this explains how to pass other parameters to a method via the -> notation. Continuing the example I've stated a...