Re: Re: What should be returned in scalar context?

[Juerd]

in reply to Re: What should be returned in scalar context?
in thread What should be returned in scalar context?

I hate having to write $x = uc $x; when the dwimmiest way would be uc $x; and have it mutate in void context.

The funny (?) thing is that Perl itself is inconsistent when it comes to operators that change strings.

Mutating	Not mutating
chomp chop s/// tr///	lc lcfirst quotemeta uc ucfirst

[chromatic]

As of last week, Larry's plan is to make Perl 6 much more consistent in that respect. My speculation (not his official pronouncement) is that there'll be two versions of each operator, one that works in-place and one that returns the modified value, leaving the original untouched.

It'll probably go further than Ruby's convention of postfixing ! to methods that operate in-place, perhaps having language support for adding this behavior to your own operators.

It's only in the idea stages, though.