On Sun, Apr 30, 2006 at 06:33:01PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: : On Sun, Apr 30, 2006 at 09:58:21AM -0700, Larry Wall wrote: : : > Neither of those are currently legal in infix position. The backslash : : > Backslash also has the advantage of making sense to a C programmer: : > : > $foo\ : > .foo(); : : So this also would be legal? : : $foo \ : .foo(); : : ?
That's a legal long dot but still a Perl syntax error because you've got two terms in a row. A postfix still isn't allowed to have space before it, so the backslash must be the first thing. : (and therefore presumably the variant that is a bug in C or Makefiles: : : $foo \ : .foo(); It does fix that bug, since \ quotes any whitespace, not just newline. : I don't mean that as a counter argument. It's an argument in favour. That : space you can't see is a really annoying invisible bug in C source code that's : sometimes hard to track down. Making it not-a-bug seems good.) Seems so to me too. I don't see much downside to \. as a long dot. Larry
