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Postings from May 2010
On 18 May 2010 21:22, demerphq <demerphq@gmail.com> wrote: > On 18 May 2010 20:29, Jesse Vincent <jesse@fsck.com> wrote: >> On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 06:20:15PM +0000, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote: >>> On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 17:52, karl williamson <public@khwilliamson.com> wrote: >>> > I asked Yves privately about this, and he wonders if it is worth trying to >>> > not break constructs like '/foo/lt +2' >>> >>> I don't think it's worth it. We should just pick the modifier letters >>> that make sense and not bend over backwards to be backwards compatible >>> with a *very* small amount of code out there. >> >> I'd rather we design a solution that doesn't break backward >> compatibility, no matter how much code we _think_ it might break. If >> that turns out to be completely untenable, then we can talk about how we >> hurt our users. > > I have to say that while I tend to agree with you in general on this > one I think the boat already sailed. > > For instance, what characters can follow an s/// expression and a m// > expression vary. > > So, on one hand we have stuff like: > > m/..../ge +1 > > which is a syntax error, but > > m/..../le +1 > > is a valid expression, yet > > s/...//ge +1 > > is interpreted as (s/...//ge) (+1). > > Given how muddy the waters already are IMO this type of breakage is > only of interest to golfers. And is likely to involve only a mere > handful of scripts who probably aren't going to upgrade anyway. Anyone > sane puts a space after a regex and its modifiers anyway IMO. > > Anyway, if we really are going to care about this now I really think > we aught to introduce deprecation warning when a character is > encountered immediately following a regex pattern (of any sort) that > is not a legal modifier so that we dont have to worry about it ever > again. > > And I will note that the introduction of /p was achieved without > anyone reporting any problems like this. And in fact historically we DID have IMO a more worrying construct added, and I suspect it also was harmless. I speak specifically of the /x modifier. /foo/x 10 would have had a rather different meaning before and after the introduction of "commented pattern mode". Yves -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"Thread Previous | Thread Next