Re: Perl's Bad Ideas

6. [ <> globbing was a bad idea ] Why? Implementation, or too much for one operator?

Too much semantics on one piece of notation. If Larry hadn't unnecessarily overloaded <> to do globbing, then you would be able to write

    @array_of_fhs = ...;

    my $line = <$array_of_fhs[37]>;
[download]

Which you can't presently do, and which frequently trips people up. Without the glob overloading, this would have meant just what it appears to.

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Re: Re: Perl's Bad Ideas by belg4mit (Prior) on Apr 07, 2002 at 01:10 UTC
`>Too much semantics on one piece of notation. If Larry hadn't unnecessarily overloaded <> >to do globbing, then you would be able to write` [download] That's what I said, or rather asked if that was why clintp disliked it. As for the catch, yes. I have had to resort to readline before because of that. `-- perl -pe "s/\b;([st])/'\1/mg"`	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Re: Perl's Bad Ideas by clintp (Curate) on Apr 07, 2002 at 03:44 UTC
That's exactly why I dislike it. I think I really started to dislike it the first time I had to teach filehandles and noted that...oh yeah, the thing in <>'s has to look exactly like <identifier> or <$identifier> or what happens is something else entirely. Ugh.	[reply]