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Postings from November 2010
On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 10:01:44AM +0100, Abigail wrote: > On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 09:27:50AM +0100, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote: > > On 24 November 2010 08:57, Zefram <zefram@fysh.org> wrote: > > > In discussing (on #p5p) possible new operators, we ran into the issue > > > that the obscure ?PATTERN? syntax gets in the way of most uses we could > > > potentially make of the question mark. It was proposed that we could > > > deprecate that syntax to reclaim the question mark. Attached patch > > > does so. It leaves the match-once semantics still available through > > > m?PATTERN?. > > > > I'd be a bit nostalgic of this venerable piece of sed-like syntax, but > > I would not object to the deprecation. > > > > Can you give an example of future usage of "?" you were thinking about ? > > > I suggest we first have some actual cases where having "?" is a > hindrance. IIRC, in a recent situation where it was a "hindrance" > it was that in the many proposed names for the '&&->' operator, '->?' > would conflict with existing syntax. > > But there were enough other possibilities left for many rounds of > bikeshedding. I did not get the impression ?PATTERN? really stood > in the way of progess. > > I do not have much love for ?PATTERN?, which, except for some obfuscation, > I have never used, nor have I encoutered it on code I had to maintain. > But this smells a bit like deprecation for the sake of deprecation, and > that always makes me uneasy. > It was deprecated in 5.000: http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/a0d0e21ea6ea90a22318550944fe6cb09ae10cda:/pod/perlop.pod#l584 Given that it's deprecated and we warn about deprecations, we should be warning about it. I don't have a strong need to actually remove it until it significantly impedes progress. -Jesse > > > Abigail --Thread Previous | Thread Next