Larry wrote:
And you get the C || and && for free
Yeah, but it's the same sense of "free" in which spam is "free". You pay for it in other ways.
But distinguishing int ops from str ops fixes the really nasty rule in Perl 5 that says "If this value (these values) has (have) ever been used in a string context..." Or was it a numeric context? I can't remember. And hey, if I can't remember...
<grin> However, I think a better fix is to default the bitwise ops to numeric, unless both args are *currently* strings. And the unary ~ and + makes it easy to be sure when you're not sure: +$x .| +$y # definitely bitwise OR ~$x .| ~$y # definitely charwise OR
If one were going to generalize that, one would be tempted to go the Ada route of specifying the radix explicitly: 0123 # decimal 2:0110 # binary 8:123 # octal 16:123 # hex 256:192.168.1.0 # base 256
Amen! Damian
