[perl #81016] Document ord("")

The following patch clarifies what ord("") does in pod/perlfunc.pod.

From the current documentation, it's not documented what it does, and one
could guess several different things: returns zero, returns undef, returns
zero with a warning, returns undef with a warning, dies.  (There's precedent
for dying: some BASIC implementations give an error if you ask for ASC("")
-- here ASC is their equivalent of our ord function.)

diff --git a/pod/perlfunc.pod b/pod/perlfunc.pod
index 806710f..f1df33c 100644 (file)
--- a/pod/perlfunc.pod
+++ b/pod/perlfunc.pod
@@ -3602,8 +3602,8 @@ X<ord> X<encoding>
 =item ord
 
 Returns the numeric (the native 8-bit encoding, like ASCII or EBCDIC,
-or Unicode) value of the first character of EXPR.  If EXPR is omitted,
-uses C<$_>.
+or Unicode) value of the first character of EXPR.  If EXPR is an empty
+string, returns 0.  If EXPR is omitted, uses C<$_>.
 
 For the reverse, see L</chr>.
 See L<perlunicode> for more about Unicode.