On Thu, Nov 25, 2004 at 09:37:21PM +0100, Juerd wrote:
: Larry Wall skribis 2004-11-25 9:39 (-0800):
: > : How is <<'END' disambiguated from <<'qw' list>>, anyway?
: > To get the qw// parse you must put a space between the << and the
: > quote. This is no hardship semantically, since qw// has always thrown
: > away initial and trailing whitespace.
: > Under one way of looking at it, it's just kind of a longest token
: > rule, since << as a term only ever means qw, and the heredoc tokens
: > are actually just long opening quotes: <<', <<", <<q/, etc. that have
: > to match a trailing quote.
:
: Is whitespace between q and the delimiters still valid? Would it be
: after <<? Would that mean using q as the first element in a qw-list will
: hurt?
:
: I hope the first answer is 'no' and all other questions are thus
: rendered irrelevant. Not that I think getting rid of alphanumeric
: delimiters is a good idea, though. I just fear complex parsing and
: seemingly random syntax errors.
Whitespace is certainly not allowed after <<q. Whether that means a
bare q should disallow whitespace is another matter. Certainly we've
taken the step of disallowing whitespace between a sub name and its
parentheses, so it's possible we could do it to q// as well, as long as
it's still possible to put whitespace between a two-part quote:
tr[a-z]
[A-Z];
But allowing the first whitespace was just a matter of being consistent.
I don't think it's a consistency we have to be consistent about, though.
Larry
