Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jpl-devvax!lwall
From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: I would prefer ~= instead of =~
Message-ID: <7431@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 15 Mar 90 18:08:18 GMT
References: <1275@ttds.UUCP>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 22

In article <1275@ttds.UUCP> juha@tds.kth.se (Juha Sarlin) writes:
: 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".

But =~ isn't an assignment operator, exactly, even though sometimes it
requires an lvalue.

: 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. :-)

I picked =~ and !~ because that's what csh uses.  (I would've used ~ like
awk but ~ means something else entirely in C.)  I think that the situation
$a =~0 arises much less frequently than the normal use of =~, and for the
former C shell programmers in the crowd, it would only cause more confusion
to switch.  Besides, $a = ~0 is much more readable, so I haven't much
sympathy.  I won't say what I think of 3 character operators--you wouldn't
like me any more...

Larry