However, the current resultant of substr as an lvalue, whilst predictable, is so twisted, and has so many edge cases, I find it inconceivable that anyone has actually found a reasonable use for the current behaviour, much less constructed an application that relies upon it.

Considering that 4-arg substr is a relative new invention (5.004? 5.005?), there must have been a lot of code that uses the lvalue-ness of substr. substr has never surprised me, but then, I've never used the 3-arg form in both rvalue and lvalue context at the same time, nor have I ever used 4-arg substr as an rvalue.

I'm not really convinced this issue is worth breaking backwards compatibility for. No doubt there is code right now that depends on this behaviour - and if the current behaviour confuses you, don't use it. Write it in two lines.

Abigail

---

---

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.