Jonathan Scott Duff writes:
: Here in my pre-caffiene morning trance it occurs to me that a few of
: the "fringe" features of perl should be removed from the langauge.
: Here's a few things that I would venture to say that none of the
: "perl5 is my first perl" people have probably ever actually used.
:
: reset # How often do you clear variables wholesale?
: dump
: ?pattern? # one-time match
: split ?pat? # implicit split to @_
: study # never been a win for me.
:
: What's everyone's feeling on removing these from perl6? How often are
: they used?
Those are all good candidates for removal, or at least "promotion" to
an external module. The only one I'd think twice about is study. For
much of Perl 5's existence, it didn't get a fair shake, since it was
buggy, and nobody noticed. Of course, that might be an argument for
removal. :-)
I'm not enamoured of the study interface, but the algorithm is
definitely a win on certain classes of data. The basic problem with
study is that it needs incestuous hooks into how you do string
searching. So even if we moved study out into an external module, we'd
still have to find some way to treat searching for constant strings as
polymorphic within the regex engine.
Larry
