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Postings from January 2023
On 1/14/23 09:39, Paul "LeoNerd" Evans wrote:
> I have a longterm thought that one day it'd be nice if we could have
> more, and more descriptive, string quoting and regexp flags - especially
> on substitutions. For example, I'd love to be able to replace only the
> third "foo" with "bar" by doing something, maybe using syntax like this:
>
> $str =~ s:nth(2)/foo/bar/;
>
> I haven't thought it through any further than "I would like the colon".
>
> That's a problem because currently colon just behaves like any other
> delimiting character.
>
> $str =~ s:nth:replacement:;
>
> Oops.
>
> I would therefore like to ask how people would feel about perl printing
> a reserved-style warning whenever a quoted string or regexp uses a
> colon for its delimiter. That is to say, any of the following forms
>
> q:string:
> qq:interpolated string:
> qw:quoted word list:
> qx:executed string:
>
> qr:regexp literal:
> m:regexp match:
> s:pattern:replacement:
> tr:trans:literation: or y:trans:literation:
>
> would all print a warning something to the effect of
>
> Use of ':' as a quotelike delimiter is reserved for possible future
> use at FILE line LINE.
>
> For now I'm not suggesting doing anything to change the actual
> behaviour. Programs would run as they do now aside from that
> (compiletime) warning. Additionally I don't have any specific concrete
> suggestion for a plan of exactly what syntax these would use.
>
> I just feel that the earlier we get that reservation in, the sooner in
> the future we can start to think about actually using it.
>
>
> Thoughts?
As much as I appreciate the sentiment behind this, I’d prefer syntax
which doesn’t break legacy code.
[I’ve just waded through a large legacy code base with a lot of regexps,
escaping ‘{’ characters in regexps because they are now fatal with the
distributed Perl on RHEL8.]
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