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Postings from August 2010
Quoth pagaltzis@gmx.de (Aristotle Pagaltzis):
> * karl williamson <public@khwilliamson.com> [2010-08-05 19:25]:
> > Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:
> > >* karl williamson <public@khwilliamson.com> [2010-08-04 15:40]:
> > >>FWIW, I have given this some thought, and came to the
> > >>conclusion that Perl is almost certainly never going to
> > >>change the defaults, because of the backward compatibility
> > >>issues.
> > >
> > >Yet you *are* changing the past default right now, *in spite*
> > >of back compat issues… :-)
> >
> > I'm not sure I understand. The default options remain the same.
> > Ben made the point in your quote above that by doing this now
> > when we are pretty much agreed that something should be done
> > will cause this to likely be the last time adding a flag would
> > cause backward compatibility issues.
>
> If the default is not allowed to change again, then we gain
> nothing from `(?~:)`.
Right.
> Right now, the problem is that the default is changing, such that
> `(?-xism)` is not an accurate representation of it.
Right.
> This is caused by the fact that we are introducing a flag that
> *requires* a choice of default.
>
> What happens if we run into this situation again in the future?
>
> If the meaning of `(?~:)` is not allowed to change, then it will
> no longer be an accurate representation, so patterns will have to
> stringify to `(?~Xy:)`.
Wrong. (?~:), with no further flags, means 'The default, whatever that
happens to be in this version of perl'. If we later introduce flags Xy,
Xz and Xw such that one of these must be specified, and Xy is the
default, then (?~:) with no mention of any X* flag will imply Xy. Thus
in
/foo(?~:bar)baz/Xz
'bar' will be matched with /Xy in effect, rather than /Xz.
(As a separate issue, presumably /Xy in such a case would correspond to
the current semantics, or a bug-fixed version thereof, with /Xz and /Xw
invoking new semantics.)
> (Personally I would rather skip the entire discussion and train
> people to do
>
> ( my $re_defaults = "" . qr/ / ) =~ s/ //g;
>
> and use *that* instead of hardcoding *either* `(?-xism:)` *or*
> `(?~:)` *or* anything else, because that’s guaranteed to yield
> the right default stringification now and forever.)
+1. I'm beginning to regret suggesting the idea in the first place...
Ben
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