Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!umich!yale!mintaka!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!kth.se!draken!ttds!juha
From: juha@ttds.UUCP (Juha Sarlin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: I would prefer ~= instead of =~
Message-ID: <1275@ttds.UUCP>
Date: 14 Mar 90 19:23:15 GMT
Reply-To: juha@tds.kth.se (Juha Sarlin)
Organization: The Royal Inst. of Techn., Stockholm
Lines: 10

I think it would be nice if the =~ operator was renamed to ~=.  This
would make it more consistent with the other assignment operators and
less ambiguous; eg, "$a =~0" is currently not the same as "$a = ~0".

Unfortunately this change would probably break most current perl scripts,
but perhaps ~= could just be added as an alias for =~ and !~= as an alias
for !~.  Then we'd only have to wait a few hundred years for everybody to
stop using the obsoleted operators. :-)
--
Juha Sarlin   juha@tds.kth.se