actually I don't wanna get rid of the feature but of the syntax.

Then we are (mostly) in violent agreement.

I still think that ++ being special-cased for strings is a rather harmless example, and there is another argument for keeping it: It's nicely symmetric with how ranges of strings work:

$ perl -wE 'say for "a".."e"'
a
b
c
d
e
[download]

which might be used a bit more often than direct increment on strings.

Now that we've already having this discussion, I'd like to point out some more Perl 5 features that could be reworked to much saner:

• The flipflop (.. operator in scalar context) could have its own operator, making accidental usage of ranges in scalar context much less confusing
• reverse should lose its magic dual functionality (list reversal vs. string reveral) depending on context. Perl 6 uses another function for string reversal (flip), but other approaches are possible too.
• Whitespace is allowed between sigils and the name of the variable. There's no good reason to keep that.
• Indirect method call syntax. (This one is hard to remove).
• The control sequences for newish regex features are really obscure and hard to remember.

But in the long run, removing cruft is only a small part of evolving Perl 5. I firmly believe that in order to stay competitive, it needs a type system(*), proper subroutine signatures and a less bare-bones OO system in core.

(*) If the need for a type system isn't obvious to you, let me just tell you that at least 95% of all the character encoding trouble in Perl 5 could easily be avoided by having separate types for text strings and byte buffers.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.