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Postings from February 2022
Apologies if these bits are already decided. Feel free to ignore.
On Friday, 25 February 2022, 19:20:50 CET, David Nicol <davidnicol@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is it set in stone yet that trim takes only one arg (has a ($) prototype)?
>
> Compare:
>
> my @trimmed = trim @strings; # handling multiple arguments is orthogonal to in-place or not
I don't think that's orthogonal. If we do in-place on the grounds that things like chomp() do that, I would ask why chomp() allows a list and trim() does not.
Also, in-place means that this is going to bite people:
my @orig = ...; # must not be changed
my @new = map { trim } @orig; # oops. you changed it
Even if in-place also returned the trimmed value, we've mutated our original list, so I need to make an extra copy to protect it. That's an annoying bit of structural code to need to remember to achieve the behavior I want. (though in practice, I don't know that this would be a big deal).
Also, I've had a couple of weird "action at a distance" issues I've debugged in the past because someone's written something like `s/x/y/ for @_` and there's been a constant passed to the sub in question.
Having trim() behave like, well, just about every other language would not only avoid what I think are traps (but maybe not serious ones), but also be less surprising (the more serious issue).
Cheers,
Ovid
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