Larry Wall wrote:
Seems so to me too. I don't see much downside to \. as a long dot.
The only remaining problem that I see for the long dot is largely orthogonal to the selection of the first and last characters - namely, that your only choice for filler is whitespace. Although the C<\.> option opens an intriguing possibility of defining the long dot pattern as "backslash, dot or whitespace (repeated zero or more times), dot": $xyzzy.foo() $fooz\.foo() $foo\..foo() $fa\...foo() $and_a_long_one_I_still_want_to_align\ .......foo() $etc\..foo() -- Jonathan Lang