Re: Re: What should be returned in scalar context?

I hate having to write $x = uc $x; when the dwimmiest way would be uc $x; and have it mutate in void context.

The funny (?) thing is that Perl itself is inconsistent when it comes to operators that change strings.

Mutating Not mutating

chomp
chop
s///
tr/// lc
lcfirst
quotemeta
uc
ucfirst

Mutating	Not mutating
chomp chop s/// tr///	lc lcfirst quotemeta uc ucfirst

Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

Comment on Re: Re: What should be returned in scalar context?

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Re: Re: Re: What should be returned in scalar context? by chromatic (Archbishop) on Dec 03, 2003 at 01:46 UTC
As of last week, Larry's plan is to make Perl 6 much more consistent in that respect. My speculation (not his official pronouncement) is that there'll be two versions of each operator, one that works in-place and one that returns the modified value, leaving the original untouched. It'll probably go further than Ruby's convention of postfixing `!` to methods that operate in-place, perhaps having language support for adding this behavior to your own operators. It's only in the idea stages, though.	[reply] [d/l]

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Re: Re: Re: What should be returned in scalar context?
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Dec 03, 2003 at 01:46 UTC

As of last week, Larry's plan is to make Perl 6 much more consistent in that respect. My speculation (not his official pronouncement) is that there'll be two versions of each operator, one that works in-place and one that returns the modified value, leaving the original untouched.

It'll probably go further than Ruby's convention of postfixing ! to methods that operate in-place, perhaps having language support for adding this behavior to your own operators.

It's only in the idea stages, though.

[reply]
[d/l]