in reply to getting rid of costly special features

I do for the first two, but never into overflow: I use it when I know the length will stay the same, but I use it for numeric as well as for alphanumeric.

Thinking of it, I seldom - maybe never - use those in one-liners, but I do in scripts:

$ perl -wE'$_="image001";say++$_' image002

Go perl! :)


Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn