Re: Things to remove

[Larry Wall]

Tom Christiansen writes:
: >I've very rarely found cases where ?? was useful and // didn't work, and
: >never in regular code.
: 
: >From the Camel:
: 
:     The C<??> operator is most useful when an ordinary pattern match
:     would find the last rather than the first occurrence:
: 
:       open DICT, "/usr/dict/words" or die "Can't open words: $!\n";
:       while (<DICT>) {
:           $first = $1 if ?(^neur.*)?;
:           $last  = $1 if /(^neur.*)/;
:       }
:       print $first,"\n";          # prints "neurad"
:       print $last,"\n";           # prints "neurypnology"
: 
: Nothing a SMOP can't address, but for one liners at the least, the
: S part would seem to preclude the P part.

I don't think the S and the P are that preclusive.  For the example above
you can just say:

    /(^neur.*)/ .. ""

If you want to be able to reset, then say

    /(^neur.*)/ .. !$x++        # reset with $x = 0;

Larry