in reply to why are hex values not numbers?

Once you get this vexed question nailed down, I think you should investigate why the substr built-in is named "substr" and not "substring", "subStr", "subString", "sub_str", "sub_string" or any of a large number of other possibilities. You may answer "Well, they had to call it something," but is just saying "The documentation says it, I believe it, that settles it!" ever really satisfactory? Question authority! (Please see perlfunc for additional raw material. Personally, I've been wondering a lot lately about grep.)

Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

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Re^2: why are hex values not numbers?
by choroba (Cardinal) on Sep 28, 2016 at 09:08 UTC
    English Wikipedia on Grep:

    > grep's name comes from the ed command g/re/p (globally search a regular expression and print)

    ($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,

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Re^2: why are hex values not numbers?
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Sep 28, 2016 at 10:21 UTC

    I think you should investigate why the substr built-in is named "substr" and not "substring", "subStr", "subString", "sub_str", "sub_string" or any of a large number of other possibilities.
    Alas, even the shortest of these (substr) is way too long to be competitive at code golf. As a golfer, I wish Perl had used a built-in operator rather than the substr function for string slicing. This is one of the very few areas where Python trounces Perl at code golf, as discussed in detail at Re: Drunk on golf: 99 Bottles of Beer.

    Quite apart from golf, I miss Python's concise and powerful string slicing operator when coding in Perl and feel string slicing is a common enough operation to warrant a very short "Huffman-coded" way to do it -- especially given "things that are commonly used should be shorter/more succinct" is one of Larry's language design principles. I also find it odd that Perl supports built-in array and hash slices, but not built-in string slices.

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      I quite agree with your reasoning and conclusion. That said, substr is one of the Perl functions I use the least; uncommonly, on par with things like getpwuid, at least for me.

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