Re6: Memory Use/Garbage Collection: Java vs Perl

Am I correct in my (I'm not sure if it's a memory of something I read somewhere, or an assumption I have formed) that Perl will fold string constants?

Apparently it does not.

perl -MO=Deparse,-q -e"print qq(I am $x\n) . 'and fold this?'"
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it taken as

print(('I am ' . $x . "\n") . 'and fold this?');
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not print('I am ' . $x . "\nand fold this?").

—John

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Re: Re6: Memory Use/Garbage Collection: Java vs Perl by jsprat (Curate) on Sep 03, 2002 at 20:55 UTC
True, but `perl -MO=Deparse,-q -e "print 'Hello, ' . 'World'"` Is parsed as `print 'Hello, World'; -e syntax OK` [download] Apparently, the example you gave was more complex than the parser wanted to deal with. Update Added -q, as John pointed out below...	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Re6: Memory Use/Garbage Collection: Java vs Perl by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Sep 03, 2002 at 21:34 UTC
You forgot the -q, so the string folding is done by Deparse's formatting, totally hiding what you were trying to detect. Trying it with, it seems that's still indeed working. A few other quick tests, and it seems that the presence of interpolation prevents the merging, rather than merging the tail-end piece as you would expect. Any perl hacker want to comment? —John	[reply]