I'm still looking for an answer to the question.

Weird, because I answered it. You need to look at the opcode tree to see if the next op in the caller is a dereference.

People have functions that grab onto operators and such all the time.

No idea what that means.

It's call 'syntactic sugar'

I didn't say being magical was bad, I said what you wanted was too magical. There is syntactic sugar, and then there is syntactic sludge.

It also violates the HTML standard.

So? I'm sure you'll find it's violated in many other ways since this site doesn't accept HTML, but something similar to it.

Just put a <p> at the front of every paragraph, and put computer text (input, output, code) in <c>...</c> tags.

If PM used a keyword that wasn't part of the HTML standard, like 'literal', then there wouldn't be a prob,

Actually, it wouldn't help at all. Those tools you mention would misparse the contents of the tag no matter what it's called.

At least slashdot is smart enough to recognize plaintext and leave it as such .. whereas here...all formatting is stripped, and a proprietary formatting language is used...ug!

Your "ug" is misplaced. It should be attached to "all formatting is stripped". Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not a good solution.

In reply to Re^3: How to determine if 'ref' is wanted? (ala 'wantarray') by ikegami
in thread How to determine if 'ref' is wanted? (ala 'wantarray') by perl-diddler

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.