Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!van-bc!ubc-cs!phillips
From: phillips@cs.ubc.ca (George Phillips)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Counting RE occurrences
Summary: perl == APL++?
Keywords: regexps, /g, /n, split, arrays, APL, invert
Message-ID: <1991May21.075323.24778@cs.ubc.ca>
Date: 21 May 91 07:53:23 GMT
References: <1991May13.225603.29819@convex.com> <1991May16.010149.20536@uunet.uu.net> <1991May17.132403.12104@convex.com>
Sender: usenet@cs.ubc.ca (Usenet News)
Organization: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 32

In article <1991May17.132403.12104@convex.com> tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
>From the keyboard of rbj@uunet.uu.net (Root Boy Jim):
>:>I know, I know... along that road lies APL and madness.
>:
>:Too late. Perl is already weirder than APL. Uglier too.
>
>Oh good, does that mean we'll get
>
>    @a += @b;
>    @c = @a + @b;
>
>one of these days then? :-)

Nah, too conventional.  Go for an extension to the array to associative
array assignment.  We can already do this:

%a = ("bip", "bop", "boop", "beep" );

So why not:

%a .= ("more", "less", "more", "even less" );

Which should give $a{"more"} eq "lesseven less".  Now round it out
to support "+=", "*=" and all the other op assignment operators.

Not only would this be cute, but it could save as much as 3 lines of
code in every hundredth perl script you write.

%p .= (Just," another ",Just,Perl,Just," hacker,");print %p."\n";

--
George Phillips phillips@cs.ubc.ca {alberta,uw-beaver,uunet}!ubc-cs!phillips