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Re: A shorter long dot

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From:
Larry Wall
Date:
April 30, 2006 10:42
Subject:
Re: A shorter long dot
Message ID:
20060430174227.GA22414@wall.org
On Sun, Apr 30, 2006 at 06:33:01PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote:
: On Sun, Apr 30, 2006 at 09:58:21AM -0700, Larry Wall wrote:
: 
: > Neither of those are currently legal in infix position.  The backslash
: 
: > Backslash also has the advantage of making sense to a C programmer:
: > 
: >     $foo\
: >     .foo();
: 
: So this also would be legal?
: 
:     $foo								\
:     .foo();
: 
: ?

That's a legal long dot but still a Perl syntax error because you've
got two terms in a row.  A postfix still isn't allowed to have space
before it, so the backslash must be the first thing.

: (and therefore presumably the variant that is a bug in C or Makefiles:
: 
:     $foo								\ 
:     .foo();

It does fix that bug, since \ quotes any whitespace, not just newline.

: I don't mean that as a counter argument. It's an argument in favour. That
: space you can't see is a really annoying invisible bug in C source code that's
: sometimes hard to track down. Making it not-a-bug seems good.)

Seems so to me too.  I don't see much downside to \. as a long dot.

Larry

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