Larry Wall Quotes on Syntax
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And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is. :-)
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If I allowed 'next $label' then I'd also have to allow 'goto $label', and I don't think you really want that... :-)
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> (It's sorta like sed, but not. It's sorta like awk, but not. etc.) Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.
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So far we've managed to avoid turning Perl into APL. :-)
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True, it returns ' ' for false, but ' ' is an even more interesting number than 0.
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I surely do hope that's a syntax error.
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That gets us out of deciding how to spell Reg[eE]xp?|RE . . . Of course, then we have to decide what ref $re returns... :-)
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There's something to be said for returning the whole syntax tree.
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And other operators aren't so special syntactically, but weird in other ways, like 'scalar', and 'goto'.
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I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'. :-)
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If this were Ada, we'd simply doc it as 'erroneous'.
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So I'm thinking about ??, or !!, or //, or \, or whatever. But I think I like ?? the best so far. Or the least worst.
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/* This bit of chicanery makes a unary function followed by a parenthesis into a function with one argument, highest precedence. */
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The autodecrement is not magical.
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When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.
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:I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon.
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Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon.
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Interestingly enough, since subroutine declarations can come anywhere, you wouldn't have to put BEGIN {} at the beginning, nor END {} at the end. Interesting, no? I wonder if Henry would like it. :-)
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I knew I'd hate COBOL the moment I saw they'd used 'perform' instead of 'do'.