A very good - "political"- point! 8)

Anyway I didn't say that consistency is more important than functionality!

Let me explain .. if we're talking about rare edge cases any consistent output can be - from a higher point of view - a valid interpration.

An example, lets take a binary operator x which is used on two boole values A and B, such that

X 0 1 B
  - -
0|0 1
1|1 ? 
A

[download]

? denotes the edgecase of A=B=1 - in ikegamis words GI (=garbage input) - which produces inconsistent output, sometimes 0 sometimes 1, which causes many people to avoid this unpredictable operator.

Now surprisingly making it consistent is always a win. With ?=1 we get the OR operator, with ?=0 it's XOR!

Ok it's a simplified example, our case is more complicated, but I hope you get my point, why consistency is -technically - a win.

In our problem ?

Well it's the edge case of resetting pos. The result of the next match is inconsistent for an input of pos=undef and pos=0, which doesn't really make much sense.

So consistency is the first step on the way to kill bugs, your point is more about if improvements should be done step by step!

Cheers Rolf

In reply to Re^4: [bugs?] perldoc perlre, \G and pos() (why consistency counts) by LanX
in thread [bugs?] perldoc perlre, \G and pos() by LanX

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