On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 09:43:30AM +0100, Smylers wrote: > Aristotle Pagaltzis writes: > > > Personally: > > > > • I agree /$empty/ should be deprecated. > > > > • I oppose changing its behaviour without a deprecation cycle. > > “Warning: We've found a bug in your code. Please fix it now, otherwise a > future version of Perl will automatically fix it for you.” > > > At that point, the special case is so well circumscribed that I see > > no real gain in excising [use of literal //] entirely, however > > ancient-Unix-warty it may be. > > Would it have advantages for users of the identically spelt // > defined-or operator? Specifically, are there circumstances where > somebody who makes a mistake while trying to use defined-or could get an > error message but at the moment gets mysterious repeat-match behaviour? > Or does get an error message, but a suboptimal one? That seems unlikely. I don't see any obvious way to get Perl confuse a binary operator with a term. Perhaps sometime, a single person has once written a program intending to use // where Perl is using repeat-match and he/she never noticed this when running the program. And while he/she may benefit if he/she gets to upgrade the perl used, it seems to far fetched to count as an argument to eliminate the use of repeat-match. AbigailThread Previous | Thread Next