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Postings from August 2010
* hv@crypt.org <hv@crypt.org> [2010-08-09 12:10]: > I do not believe the "what if we change the default" argument > has any relevance - it's not something we can ever do, because > it would change the meaning of every regexp ever written for > which that particular flag had not explicitly been specified. > Ben's argument that "right now the default is changing" is > incorrect That was my argument, not Ben’s, and you can call it “right now the default stringification is changing” if you want to. The bottom line is the same anyway. > there is a new flag, but the default value for the flag is > "whatever perl used to do", and that's the only default value > we could ever have chosen. Right. But we have to add the flag to the stringification even though its default means no behavioural change over previous versions of Perl. What if we add more flags that need to be added to the default stringication even though their default setting means no behavioural change over previous versions of Perl? Then you get the argument we had before. Either `(?~:)` changes meaning and patterns used across Perl versions now start meaning different things on different Perls; or its meaning never changes and you need to add the flags to the default stringification, so you get the same breakage we are facing right now. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>Thread Previous | Thread Next