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From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Changing the first character of a string.
Message-ID: <8611@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 5 Jul 90 23:01:12 GMT
References: <1990Jul5.135434.11674@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 20

In article <1990Jul5.135434.11674@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU> worley@compass.com writes:
: 
:    From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
: 
:    You'll have to ask the designers of C that question.  Perl isn't treating
:    it at all specially here--it's just relying on the convention that normal
:    text never contains it.  /[^\0]/ is just an idiom for matching any textual
:    character including newline, which /./ specifically won't match.
: 
: Sounds like a good way to get screwed if the string actually contains
: a NUL.  Why not "(.|\n)"?

It's not likely to contain a NUL in the context we were originally talking
about, in which the programmer will probably have initialized the string to
spaces.  Then again, it's unlikely to contain a newline for the same reason.

And (.|\n) is considerably slower, at least the way things are currently
set up.  It wouldn't be if we were using a DFA.  But we aren't.

Larry