Sorry, but my contention is that there almost certainly isn't code right now that depends upon this behaviour.

This is a problem that always plays when there is the suggestion to break backwards compatibility. It's easy to claim there isn't code right now that depends on this behaviour. It's a lot harder to prove that there isn't. Considering the years of Perl programming that have led to millions of lines of code, I'd be surprised if there isn't code that depends on it - whether is was programmed knowingly or not.

I can't believe that you, of all people, are suggesting that the rest of the world eshew a possible, advanced behaviour just because it is not one that you personally have ever thought to try, or because it is easily achieved by the combination of two simpler ones?

My reason to not favour this behaviour change have all to do with breaking backwards compatibility - not with personal experience. Now, I'm not against everything that breaks backwards compatibility - but if something breaks backwards compatibility one has to look at the advantages and the disadvantages. The latter means, how much code will break? Probably not much, but how much, we don't know. OTOH, the gain of the proposed change isn't too big either, it could also be archieved by breaking down one statement into two.

So, I'm not in favour because I think the possible gain of the change might not outweight the lost (breakage of code).

Abigail