Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!cs.utexas.edu!convex!usenet
From: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: alpha numbers
Message-ID: <1991Jun24.135841.3122@convex.com>
Date: 24 Jun 91 13:58:41 GMT
References: <1991Jun23.200134.18835@pronto.mh.nl> <1991Jun24.080038.28256@convex.com>
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Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen)
Organization: CONVEX Software Development, Richardson, TX
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From the keyboard of tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen):
::Exhibit 2:
::
::	$a = "1a";
::	$a++;
::
::IMHO, the correct value for $a should now be "1b", not 2.
:
:Hmm... in mine as well.  'aa' goes to 'ab'; why shouldn't
:'1a' go to '1b'?

Silly me -- as I was gently reminded in mail,  the regexp for 
string magic is documented in the man page to be:

    /^[a-zA-Z]*[0-9]*$/

whereas I somehow was thinking it was:

    /^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$/

I knew there was a reason I always wrote symbol generators as:

    $gensym = "symbol000000";
    sub gensym { $gensym++; }
    $handle = &gensym;

--tom
--
Tom Christiansen		tchrist@convex.com	convex!tchrist
		"So much mail, so little time."