TITLE

Eliminate =~ operator.

VERSION

  Maintainer: Steve Fink <steve@fink.com>
  Date: 21 Aug 2000
  Last Modified: 8 Sep 2000
  Mailing List: perl6-language-regex@perl.org
  Number: 138
  Version: 2
  Status: Withdrawn

ABSTRACT

Replace EXPR =~ m/.../ with m/.../ EXPR, and similarly for s/// and tr///. Force an explicit dereference when using qr/.../. Disallow the implicit treatment of a string as a regular expression to match against.

CHANGES

Withdrawn on 8 Sep 2000. Seems like discussion is pretty much over, Larry's seen it and commented, and RFC164 mostly encompasses the idea, so I'm withdrawing this one just to clean things up. Besides, I don't want to maintain too many RFCs and I've got an idea for another one. :-)

DESCRIPTION

The EXPR =~ m/.../ syntax is ugly and unintuitive, something only its mother (awk? sed?) could love. It performs a function that is semantically no different from other forms of argument passing. This RFC proposes to eliminate the =~ binding operator and treat m, tr, and s almost like regular subroutine names but with slightly different syntax and semantics.

To illustrate the proposal by example, the current

 /pattern/;
 m/pattern/;
 $x =~ /pattern/;
 ($a, $b, $c) = $x =~ /p(a)t(t)e(r)n/;
 gsx =~ s/pattern/subst/gsx;
 $r = qr/pattern/; $x =~ $r;
 $r = "pattern"; $x =~ $r;

would become

 /pattern/;
 m/pattern/;
 /pattern/ $x; OR /pattern/ ($x);
 ($a, $b, $c) = /p(a)t(t)e(r)n/ $x;
 s/pattern/subst/gsx (gsx);
 $r = qr/pattern/; $r->($x);
 same as the previous, or $r = "pattern"; /$r/ ($x);

Specifically, all patterns behave as if they are subroutines with a ($) prototype, except they have the current syntax for their first argument, and $1 etc. interpolation remain unchanged.

qr/.../ would produces a CODE ref that may be invoked with the pattern to match against. It would be a regular CODE ref rather than the current magical Regexp reference type.

RELATED WACKY IDEA #1: Everything's a reference

Alternatively, we could think of m/.../ as always returning a reference, so that the syntax is /pattern/->($x). This is much more visually distinctive, but runs afoul of Larry's "no implicit dereferencing" rule in order to make /pattern/ default to /pattern/->($_). On the other hand, $a =~ $b already breaks that rule by dereferencing qr// refs, so maybe it's not such a big deal.

RELATED WACKY IDEA #2: Creating references to matching operations

Now forget about the previous alternative and assume as in the main section that we have /pattern/ ($x) and qr/pattern/->($x). This naturally leads to \m/pattern/ or \&m/pattern/ as an equivalent for qr/pattern/, and also introduces \s/pattern/subst/ and \tr/pattern/subst/ as new reference types.

IMPLEMENTATION

Minor parser changes. Currently, the relevant rule in perly.y is term MATCHOP term. The terms would be reversed, and the first would need to be renamed to cover only s///, m//, and tr/// (and equivalents). So it would be something like matchterm term.

REFERENCES

Contributors

  Dirk Meyers <demyers@pscnet.com> came up with this idea.

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