It looks like the change was a deliberate choice in response to the issues raised 9 or 10 years ago by my earlier posts on the issue of lvalue refs.

As far as I'm concerned, lvalue refs have never been made to work the way they intuitively should. And the way they do work entirely limits their usefulness. Limits it to the point of almost uselessness. The utterly unnecessary wholesale duplication of referenced substring is just mockery.

And taking a look into the current implementation of substr it is no wonder that it is so slow. The result of all the different tweaks and modifications over the years by so many different hands attempting to fix the lvalues refs; signed/unsigned 32-bit offsets and unicode problems -- further compounded with the stupid indentation -- make it look like it was coded by a rank beginner with no concept of basic coding principles -- like DRY.

The only way to fix it -- and all the problems that still afflict it -- would be to start again from scratch. And we both know the likelihood of that ever happening.

The only solution I can think of is to write a module that overrides CORE::GLOBAL::substr and implements it in a sane fashion. But given the overhead of calling back into perl, that's not going to be performant either.

All in all, it's a depressing state of affairs.

With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'
Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

The start of some sanity?

In reply to Re^2: Perl5 patches by BrowserUk
in thread Perl5 patches by BrowserUk

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