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Postings from August 2010
On 4 August 2010 15:55, David Golden <xdaveg@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 9:12 AM, Jesse Vincent <jesse@fsck.com> wrote: >>> I would suggest we reconsider whether this is really a "deprecation" >>> situation. Is there any documentation that states that such >>> constructs are legal? I was surprised to find that they are. I would >>> have expected it to be a syntax error. If we instead "fix the bug" >>> that invalid regex flags are not detected as a syntax error, then we >>> don't have to consider this a deprecated feature and we don't have to >>> wait two years for a sane approach. That may lead us to favor >>> different options. >> >> "Not documented" isn't really a great metric for "is fine to break >> without notice" unless we turn it on with the 5.14 pragma. > > That's not what I meant. I'm saying that another valid interpretation > is that it is a bug in the parser that Perl doesn't flag a "run-on" > between regex modifiers and certain keywords as a syntax error. > > Of course, we can debate whether it's a bug or a feature. But I feel > that the default assumption so far has been "feature" and that we > follow the "can't be removed without a deprecation cycle" policy. I'm > calling the question of whether this is a bug, and I believe the > standing policy is that we don't have to be backwards compatible with > bugs. > > If we had this debate before regex modifiers were ever introduced, I'm > pretty confident the view would be that it's a bad idea to allow a > run-on precisely because it closes out the extensibility of future > regex modifiers (not to mention being just generally confusing). > Thus, I think the behavior is a bug, not a feature. > > I was asking about documentation to see if there is any evidence to > the contrary that would suggest this behavior was intentional design. FWIW(IAA) I vote bug. yves -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"Thread Previous | Thread Next