To be fair, this is a lot of perl. But I can't rightfully assert that this behavior was unintentional, in fact it appears to be very intentional (e.g., awk emulation).

>You also are missing the idea.

My understanding is that you wish for "strings" (versus "regexes") to invoke the awk behavior of trimming leading white space. Is that right? I'm not here to judge your suggestion, but I can easily think of several reasons why adding another special case to split is not a great idea.

All I can say is you're the same guy who was looking for the trim method in Perl. If that's not a red flag for being okay with balkanization, I don't know what is.

Finally, I must reiterate. A "string" is a regular expression. The single quoted whitespace is most definitely a special exception since it is also a regular expression. You're recommending not only removing one regex from the pool of potential regexes, but an entire class of them available via quoting - i.e., fixed length strings of a fixed ordering. I am not sure how this is really a suggestion of making all quoted things not be regexes, because then how do you decide if it is "regex" or not? (maybe use a regex? xD)