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[perl #128241] Deprecate /$empty_string/

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From:
Father Chrysostomos via RT
Date:
May 26, 2016 05:01
Subject:
[perl #128241] Deprecate /$empty_string/
Message ID:
rt-4.0.18-23363-1464238891-734.128241-15-0@perl.org
On Wed May 25 21:55:41 2016, sprout wrote:
> It often comes up on the list that /$foo/ is subject to re-use of the
> last match if $foo is empty, and most people then admit that it was a
> mistake, and that the last match should be used only when the // is
> syntactically empty.  (I believe we have consensus on this, but I may
> be mistaken.)
> 
> Because of backward-compatibility, we cannot simply change it, but we
> could emit a deprecation warning whenever /$foo/ uses the last
> successful match.
> 
> I suspect this will catch many bugs in people’s code.  After the
> deprecation cycle, we can make /$foo/ behave the same way as
> /(?:$foo)/.

I forgot to mention.  Anyone who intentionally wants /$foo/ to use the previous match will also get the deprecation warning and change the code to do it some other way.

That said, we might want to change /$foo/ without a deprecation cycle, since almost every use of it to mean last-successful-match is probably a bug.  This should probably be done early in the dev cycle.

In ticket #128225, Yves Orton wrote:
> Fwiw i dont buy the back compat argument on this
> one. I have never seen this feature deliberately
> used, most people are unaware of it and when they
> discover it they consider it a bug like in this
> thread. In fact the only time I have seen it used
> is in toy code that I wrote to demonstrate the
> feature. I am convinced that nobody would notice
> and that the *many* issues that have come from it
> over the years justifies removing it entirely.

Are you referring to the removal of // as referring to the last successful match?  I am strongly opposed to that, but I don’t mind changing /$foo/-as-last-match, without a deprecation cycle, if we do it soon.

-- 

Father Chrysostomos


---
via perlbug:  queue: perl5 status: new
https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=128241

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