http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=569144

I was I was babbling in #perl on irc.freenode.net about the perl design decision to not overload '.=' to work differently when operating on an array (pushing.) I feel this should work 'as I expect it to', and there is no reason to make this operator useless when the lhs is an array, or array ref. However, my opinions aside, Rindolf made a suggestion that should be the subject of meditation and might fit even more with the Perl ideology. ",=". It should be noted that such an operator wouldn't cause breakage with 5.10 because of its status in 5.8 -- nonexistent. It would be looked upon like //=, as sexy syntactic sugar.



Transcript as follows:

12:03 < EvanCarroll> eval: @_=[qw/foo bar baz/]; @_ .= 'bleh'; @_; 12:03 < buubot> EvanCarroll: Error: Can't modify array dereference in +concatenation (.) or string at eval line 1, at EOF 12:03 < EvanCarroll> didn't think so 12:03 < EvanCarroll> oh well back to pushing 12:03 < rindolf> EvanCarroll: maybe there should be a ,= 12:04 < rindolf> EvanCarroll: you can also try to overload an operator +. 12:04 < EvanCarroll> rindolf: wow, thats actually a good idea. 12:04 < EvanCarroll> rindolf: I won't overload it for myself; but ,= w +ould fit very elegantly into the perl arsenal of operators



Evan Carroll
www.EvanCarroll.com