Hi all,

I'm sure we've all wished for a concatenation operator that would prepend a string to a string in the same way the .= operator appends.

So why isn't there one?

It's silly that you can write: 

$foo .= 'bar';

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But not: 
$baz =. 'qux';

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and instead have to do: 
$baz = 'qux' . $baz;

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Today I got to wondering if I had missed that such an operator had been introduced in some recent Perl version so I ran the code, and to my surprise Perl said: 

Reversed .= operator at -e line 5.
syntax error at -e line 5, near "=."

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Now, if Perl knows that this particular syntax error is a "reversed .= operator", and not, say, "some new operator I didn't know about" - i.e. the syntax is not in use for anything else - then why isn't it implemented?

Can any guts gurus shed any light?


The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

In reply to Reversed .= operator by 1nickt

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