On Thursday, December 5, 2002, at 02:11 AM, James Mastros wrote:
\0 in addition to \x, meaning the same thing? I think that would get us back to where we were with octal, wouldn't it? I'm not real keen on leading zero meaning anything, personally... :-POn 12/04/2002 3:21 PM, Larry Wall wrote:\x and \o are then just shortcuts.Can we please also have \0 as a shortcut for \0x0?
Hmm... does this matter? I'm a bit rusty on my Unicode these days, but I was assuming that \xFF and \x00FF always pointed to the same character, and that you in fact _don't_ have the ability to put individual bytes in a string, because Perl is deciding how to place the characters for you (how long they should be, etc.) So if you wanted more explicit control, you'd use C<pack>.Which means that the only way to get a string with a literal 0xFF byte in it is with qq:u1[\xFF]? (Larry, I don't know that this has been mentioned before: is that right?) chr:u1(0xFF) might do it too, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.There ain't no such thing as a "wide" character. \xff is exactly the same character as \x[ff].
Also, an annoying corner case: is "\0x1ff" eq "\0x[1f]f", or is it eq "\0x[1ff]"? What about other bases? Is "\0x1x" eq "\0x[1]", or is it eq "\0x[1x]" (IE illegal). (Now that I put those three questions together, the only reasonable answer seems to be that the number ends in the last place it's valid to end if you don't use explicit brackets.)Yeah, my guess is that it's as you say... it goes till it can't goes no more, but never gives an error (well, maybe for "\0xz", where there are zero valid digits?) But I would suspect that the bracketed form is *strongly* recommended. At least, that's what I plan on telling people. :-)
Design team: If we're wrong on these, please correct. :-)
MikeL
