in reply to Re: Re: Re: $a++ allowed by $a-- is not ! why?
in thread $a++ allowed by $a-- is not ! why?

If I could have put any tone into the words it would be one of curiosity and respect. Judging from the votes there are more people who read a lot that was not written. Back to topic. Not implementing $foo-- as the inverse of $foo++ must have had serious reasons. The undeterminedness of the predecessor does not seem to qualify, because the meaning of undef is a lot closer to 'this string has no predecessor' than 'die' or '-1' (or foo). So there must have been more to it. What? Until now it's just guess and assume - and I can do no better.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: $a++ allowed by $a-- is not ! why?
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 31, 2003 at 07:16 UTC
    If I could have put any tone into the words it would be one of curiosity and respect.
    You called broquaint a name. You called him your Holiness. That is tone, sarcastic, even insulting. If you wish to be inquisitive, simply ask questions without saying/implying anything about the poster (especially something insulting/uninvited).

    Back to the topic, Larry Wall created perl. The perl5-porters fix bugs and may know many of the reasons why things work the way they do (although a lot of them are really busy fixing bugs). I see monks asking why all the time, and some monks have good reasons, others are just curious, but they all eventually have to accept that they will never fully/really know. The reasons behind some things are easily explained (obvious), the reasons behind others are document, and for the rest they're simply not important (as long as it's documented how it works, the why doesn't matter).

      I almost forgot to say that perl has a lot of legacy features cause backwards compatibility is important, and let's face it, Larry Wall is a lot smarter today than he was 10-20 years ago ;)