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=head1 TITLE
Retire chop().
=head1 VERSION
Maintainer: Nathan Torkington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 5 Sep 2000
Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Version: 1
Number: 195
Status: Developing
=head1 ABSTRACT
Remove chop() from the core. Its purpose is better served by chomp(),
so its remaining applications are few and limited.
=head1 DESCRIPTION
chop()'s original purpose was to remove trailing line terminators.
However, chop() is dangerous: it always removes the last character,
and it doesn't care whether the last character is a line terminator
or not.
So chomp() was introduced. This only removes the value of $/, and if
there's no $/ at the end of the string then it doesn't remove
anything. This makes it safer: if you don't know whether your string
is chomp()ed or not, you can chomp() it anyway. With chop() you had
to have a separate explicit test. chop() also doesn't know about $/
and the different values it might have.
chop() is still occasionally used, but very rarely. Not enough, in
my opinion, for chop() to stay in the core. Its functionality might
be available in a library.
=head1 IMPLEMENTATION
The perl526 translator can simply use
s/.\z//s;
for a chop() action. If there were a chop() in a standard library
then the conversion would simply be a matter of putting:
use String::Chop; # or whatever
at the top of any converted program that uses chop().
Implementation in perl6 is very straightforward: don't implement
chop().
=head1 REFERENCES
RFC 58: C<chomp()> changes.
perlfunc manpage for discussion of chomp() and chop()
