perlmeditation
EvanCarroll
<p>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.</p>
<br /><br /><p>Transcript as follows:<br />
<blockquote><code>
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 ,= would fit very elegantly into the perl arsenal of operators
</code></blockquote></p>
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<br><br>Evan Carroll<br>www.EvanCarroll.com
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