Can it be improved?

Possibly. Possibly not. But that one function does quite nicely demonstrate why perl internals are complex and hard to work with. That "clearly defined" op has to cope with (from a quick perusal of the src):

• both byte- or utf8-encoded strings - and having to convert between byte and char offsets - with a caching scheme for sometimes O(1) performance on long utf8 strings;
• delayed lvalue assignment, with sometimes the lvalueness only known at runtime depending on how a :lvalue sub has been called;
• being called in void, scalar or list context;
• handling a variable number of args;
• integer-valued args being either signed or unsigned (both are supported);
• get and set magic;
• being passed a reference rather than a string;
• issuing appropriate warnings;
• tainting;
• locales;

Putting all that together makes it really easy to break things, even with an extensive test suite.

Dave.

---

---

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.