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Re: fixing smartmatch just hard enough (and when, too)

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From:
Darin McBride
Date:
August 31, 2012 07:57
Subject:
Re: fixing smartmatch just hard enough (and when, too)
Message ID:
1511536.ZYUFrlDDoT@naboo
On Friday August 31 2012 9:48:24 AM Johan Vromans wrote:
> Darin McBride <dmcbride@cpan.org> writes:
> > Disagreed.  The shell's case statement ...
> 
> The shell (what 'the' shell??) only works with strings, creating a whole

Any shell I've used, mostly bourne-shell derivitives.

> different (and much simpler) playground for comparison and matching.

True, but my point was that case statements are NOT always just for constants.  
Saying that it's just for constants is far too specific to certain classes of 
languages that I don't think applies to Perl.  I don't expect that even if we 
did limit ourselves to constants that we would end up with a highly-optimised 
branch system the way that C does, so let's not start with a premature 
optimisation, let's start with what is *useful* given the nature of the rest 
of the language.  Of course, what comprises that is completely debatable, and 
thus the tiny little thread here.

And, yes, it's simpler for the shell.  But that, by itself, doesn't mean we 
can't/shouldn't do more.  There are other reasons for that, but I don't think 
this is one.
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