I was I was babbling in #perl on irc.freenode.net about the perl design decision to not overload '.=' to work differently when operating on an array (pushing.) I feel this should work 'as I expect it to', and there is no reason to make this operator useless when the lhs is an array, or array ref. However, my opinions aside, Rindolf made a suggestion that should be the subject of meditation and might fit even more with the Perl ideology. ",=". It should be noted that such an operator wouldn't cause breakage with 5.10 because of its status in 5.8 -- nonexistent. It would be looked upon like //=, as sexy syntactic sugar.



Transcript as follows:

12:03 < EvanCarroll> eval: @_=[qw/foo bar baz/]; @_ .= 'bleh'; @_;
12:03 < buubot> EvanCarroll: Error: Can't modify array dereference in 
+concatenation (.) or string at eval line 1, at EOF
12:03 < EvanCarroll> didn't think so
12:03 < EvanCarroll> oh well back to pushing
12:03 < rindolf> EvanCarroll: maybe there should be a ,=
12:04 < rindolf> EvanCarroll: you can also try to overload an operator
+.
12:04 < EvanCarroll> rindolf: wow, thats actually a good idea.
12:04 < EvanCarroll> rindolf: I won't overload it for myself; but ,= w
+ould fit very elegantly into the perl arsenal of operators

[download]



Evan Carroll
www.EvanCarroll.com

In reply to Should perl implement ,= or maybe overload .= (array context) by EvanCarroll

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.