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Postings from July 2012
On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 09:38:37PM +0300, Leon Timmermans wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 4:35 PM, Paul Johnson <paul@pjcj.net> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 11:44:35PM -0700, l.mai@web.de wrote:
> >
> >> % perl -we '"qwertasd"'
> >> Useless use of a constant ("qwertasd") in void context at -e line 1.
> >>
> >> % perl -we '"dsatrewq"'
> >>
> >>
> >> Any string starting with "di", "ds", or "ig" is exempt from "void context"
> >> warnings. I can't find any documentation for this misfeature. It should be
> >> removed from the interpreter.
> >
> >
> > It's not really a misfeature. It's more of an old feature. The code
> > explains why it's there:
> >
> > op.c:1473
> > /* perl4's way of mixing documentation and code
> > (before the invention of POD) was based on a
> > trick to mix nroff and perl code. The trick was
> > built upon these three nroff macros being used in
> > void context. The pink camel has the details in
> > the script wrapman near page 319. */
> >
> > As far as documentation is concerned, I suppose that it wouldn't be a
> > bad thing to make a note of this somewhere.
> >
> > As far as removing it is concerned, I presume that no one is writing new
> > code in this way, and probably hasn't for a few years. So the removal
> > is a trade-off between a slight standardisation and simplification and
> > breaking backwards compatibility with some perl4 era programs.
> >
> > I would side with keeping backwards compatibility.
>
> Considering this is a warning that has to be enabled explicitly, and
> that we're talking about perl 4 compatibility here, I wouldn't care
> too much about such a minor break of backwards compatibility. I'd be
> surprised if this was the first time in the past 18 years that such a
> thing happened.
+1
-doy
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