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Postings from December 2007
On Dec 22, 2007, at 8:35 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: > On Dec 21, 2007 12:08 PM, demerphq <demerphq@gmail.com> wrote: >> No it wont actually. The warning would only be raised when the $qr >> variable is the only thing in the pattern. The diagnostics should >> read >> (added an 'only'): >> >> +(W regexp) Your pattern contains only a variable containing a >> precompiled >> +regular expression pattern whose behavior will not be changed by the >> +pattern modifiers provided. >> >> $qr=/^foo/; >> $x=~/$qr/m; # warns; >> $x=~/$qr|foo/m; #does not warn >> $x=~/$qr/x; # does not warn (/x doesnt change match semantics) > > In the current implementation yes, but we might potentially want to > warn in the future on useless modifiers in general, eg: > > $x =~ /(?-msix:^foo)/msi; I would like to make a few points in opposition to this new warning. Before I do so, I'd like to acknowledge that such a warning would certainly be useful in alerting 5.8 -> 5.10 upgraders about the bug fix. And I appreciate the effort expended in minimizing the scope of the warning. But I think it's a readability loss overall, and when 5.8 is passé, we'll still be stuck with it. 1) The Perl Best Practices book recommends putting /m on all regexes for consistency and readability. In that paradigm, '^' and '$' always mean start/end-of-line and never start/end-of-string, which lightens the reader's mental load. 2) Perl::Critic has been recommending /m on all regexes since 0.13, so lots of people have adopted this habit. 3) People who adopted that habit were not bitten by this 5.8 -> 5.10 behavior change. 4) The new warning would mean that the above practice is now officially discouraged, at least in terms of the absoluteness of the practice. 5) Authors (like me) with working 5.8 code will have to remove harmless /m modifiers from various places just to get their code to run quietly. 6) While the modifier is indeed useless in 5.10, it's not at all harmful or wasteful, unlike say sort in void context which wasted CPU. If this patch does go in, we'll probably adapt Perl::Critic to know about this special case, and I'll probably go through all of my CPAN code to remove the extraneous modifiers, and I'll forget about this whole issue in a few months. But what a pain for so little gain... ChrisThread Previous | Thread Next