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Open-ended slices
Maintainer: Simon Cozens <simon@brecon.co.uk> Date: 24 Sep 2000 Mailing List: perl6-language@perl.org Number: 282 Version: 1 Status: Developing
The dreaded @array[$foo...] rears its ugly head again.
How many times have you wanted just the last two return values from a function? And how many times have you got frustrated that you can't work out how many things there are in a list and you have to decant it to an array:
@thingy = function()
for (@thingy[3..$#thingy]) { ... }
Horrible, isn't it? People want something better.
I thought about it last year or so, and produced a couple of patches. It seemed then that the right syntax was not, for instance:
(function())[3...-1]
because sometimes you want $x..$y to return the empty list, but
actually:
(function())[3...]
(Or [3..]. It doesn't matter.)
Someone else on Perl5-Porters wanted this recently too, so it isn't just me.
It's new syntax, so it isn't going to break anything, and I did produce patches against 5.6, so it is possible. It's a question of adding another rule to the grammar, which flags that the slice should be computed at run time.
None.