Restore the old description of $[

The new entry is a bit too futuristic: assignment to $[ still works
and it is not read-only.

This does not fully restore the old description, as it contained
grammatical errors and parts of it were not updated when 5.10 changed
the scoping.

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 5 deletions

diff --git a/pod/perlvar.pod b/pod/perlvar.pod
index 1dff9ce190..22c4477b97 100644
--- a/pod/perlvar.pod
+++ b/pod/perlvar.pod
@@ -2067,13 +2067,21 @@ Removed in Perl 5.10.
 X<$[> X<$ARRAY_BASE>
 
 This variable stores the index of the first element in an array, and
-of the first character in a substring. You used to be able to assign to
-this variable, but you can't do that anymore. It's now always 0, like
-it should be.
+of the first character in a substring. The default is 0, but you could
+theoretically set it to 1 to make Perl behave more like B<awk> (or Fortran)
+when subscripting and when evaluating the index() and substr() functions.
 
-Mnemonic: [ begins subscripts.
+As of release 5 of Perl, assignment to C<$[> is treated as a compiler
+directive, and cannot influence the behavior of any other file.
+(That's why you can only assign compile-time constants to it.)
+Its use is highly discouraged.
 
-This variable is read-only.
+Prior to Perl 5.10, assignment to C<$[> could be seen from outer lexical
+scopes in the same file, unlike other compile-time directives (such as
+L<strict>). Using local() on it would bind its value strictly to a lexical
+block. Now it is always lexically scoped.
+
+Mnemonic: [ begins subscripts.
 
 Deprecated in Perl 5.12.