Hal Fulton wrote:
> Eric Armstrong wrote:
>> There's one line in there that's driving me nuts.
>>
>>>     verbose, $VERBOSE = $VERBOSE, nil
>>
>> What the heck is that line doing??
> 
> Haha... it's a Perl/Ruby idiom...
> 
>    x, y = y, x   # swap values of x and y
> 
> So he was just saving off $VERBOSE so he
> could restore it at the end.
> 
Thank you!

I see the parentheses now:

   (x, y) = (y, x)

I recall seeing that idiom and highlighting
it, too. But when I saw it in real life, the
commas messed me up. I saw it as:

   (x), (y = y), (x)

I read your message that way, too, the first
6 times I looked at it.

It's interesting how natural language
processing swaps the precedence of = and ,
compared to the compiler.