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From: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal L. Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Crock involving $^
Message-ID: <1991Feb8.191213.7193@iwarp.intel.com>
Date: 8 Feb 91 19:12:13 GMT
References: <1991Feb8.174228.678@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Sender: news@iwarp.intel.com
Reply-To: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal L. Schwartz)
Organization: Stonehenge; netaccess via Intel, Beaverton, Oregon, USA
Lines: 29
In-Reply-To: worley@compass.com (Dale Worley)

In article <1991Feb8.174228.678@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>, worley@compass (Dale Worley) writes:
| It appears that these are to allow constructions like: $^T means "the
| variable whose name is control-T".  Since there are no such variables
| anymore, these lines should probably be removed.

No such variables anymore?  C'mon, I know 3.041 isn't *that* old.
When we got -C, -A, and -M, we got $^T.  OK, so it didn't end up in
the manpage (it went immediately into The Book, though :-), but it's
still there.

|						    (It would not be
| simple to restrict the third character of the construction to
| characters that can be legitimately controlized (letters, @, [, \, ],
| _, ^), because '^' is also an operator, leading to $^^ meaning either
| "the variable control-^" and "the variable $^ followed by the operator
| ^".

Agreed.  The syntax is messy, but it's there.  And we'll probably be
stuck with it for quite a while, now that $^T is in the mix, and we're
running out of other single chars.  Did you know you can use the
control characters literally too?  Watch this (yes, the newline is
part of the code!):

$^J = "Just another Perl hacker,"; print $
-- 
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III      |
| merlyn@iwarp.intel.com ...!any-MX-mailer-like-uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn |
\=Cute Quote: "Intel: putting the 'backward' in 'backward compatible'..."====/