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Postings from August 2010
Ben Morrow wrote:
> Quoth public@khwilliamson.com (karl williamson):
>> Ronald J Kimball wrote:
>>> On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 09:13:06AM +0100, Zefram wrote:
>>>> Ronald J Kimball wrote:
>>>>> my @options_on = qw/ s a /; # where a and b are hypothetical options
>>>>> my @options_off = qw/ i b /; # that are on by default
>>>> No options are on by default.
>>> I know that's the current state, but is that a guarantee going forwards?
>>> If options will always be off by default, then we probably don't need
>>> (?.m-i:) at all; (?.m) would be sufficient. (And my objection to Ben's
>>> proposal would be moot. :)
>>>
>>> I note that Karl mentioned that the new regex modifiers - /l, /u, and /d -
>>> are "automatically inserted" under the appropriate conditions. I don't
>>> know if that means they are "on by default" with regards to (?.)
>>>
>>> Ronald
>>>
>> Yes, /d is on by default.
>
> But there is never a need to turn it off explicitly: it's not a boolean
> option, but a three-way choice. The way to turn it off is (?.l:foo) or
> (?.u:foo), not (?.-d:foo).
More than one person has expressed a preference for ^ over dot, so I'm
thinking that will be what it ends up being.
>
> I've mentioned in passing before, and I think I should say again, that
> having a /d switch at all is rather confusing. IMHO it would be much
> better (if we're going to restrict ourselves to one-letter switches with
> no arguments) to just have /u and /l, with the old behaviour implied by
> neither of those being present. The new (?.:) syntax would mean that the
> one place where /d might potentially be used, (?d-xims:foo), is better
> written (?.:foo).
>
I mostly agree, except if that is the one flag that is being switched,
you don't want to have to specify all of them. I don't understand why
the /d is confusing. These operate like radio buttons; my 12 year old
car still has them. don't know about newer cars. The radio is always
tuned to a station. You press the button of the station you want.
> If you're going to introduce pragmata to turn some switches on for some
> lexical scopes, the question of 'so how do they get turned off again?'
> needs to be addressed in a more systematic way than just introducing a
> single special-case switch that turns some other switches off. I would
> be happy with either of
>
> use unicode_strings;
> /foo/U;
>
> or
>
> use unicode_strings;
> /foo/-u;
>
> though the latter obviously has more back-compat considerations. I would
> also be happy, for now, with requiring people write
>
> use unicode_strings;
> /(?-u)foo/;
>
> if they want to go back to the old semantics.
I would find this confusing. Either of your examples says what the
person doesn't want. It doesn't say which of the other (currently two)
choices they do want. You can't unpress a radio button to go to another
station; you must press the button you want. As more possible things
like /a got added, it would get worse.
>
> While we're discussing this: would you be at all open to the idea of
> supplying a /a ('ASCII') switch that makes \d\s\w match what everyone
> thinks they do (that is, [0-9], [ \t\n] and [a-zA-Z0-9_] respectively)?
I think that if we're going to discuss this now, it should go on another
thread. It has been discussed before, and is a possibility, but I think
it's part of a larger problem, and I think would be better served by a
more general 'use script pragma' that allows ASCII as a special
sub-script of Latin.
>
> Ben
>
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