Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jpl-devvax!lwall
From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Newlines in prints
Message-ID: <11507@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 20 Feb 91 02:35:04 GMT
References: <1991Feb20.000312.5870@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 25

In article <1991Feb20.000312.5870@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU> worley@compass.com writes:
: I'd like a simpler way to end a print line with a newline than
: appending
: 	, "\n"
: to the print.  I looked at what it might take to make a naked
: 	\n
: at the end of a print mean "\n", but a naked \n is treated as the
: symbol 'n' -- not too promising.  And you can hardly use "/" as a
: separator in place of "," to mean "add newline", as you do in Fortran.
: Perhaps what I really want is to go back to Basic-Plus, where the
: newline was implicit unless the print was ended with ";".

Well, you can save two characters by defining $n = "\n", but it sounds
more like you want to set $\ to "\n" and then have a subroutine for
printing without the newline:

	sub nprint { local($\) = ''; print @_; }

Incidentally, along these same lines, I just added a switch to do
autochopping and auto-$\-setting, so the colrm 81 program can be
emulated now with

	perl -lpe 'substr($_,80) = ""'

Larry