Sure I've had a similar desire, but since Perl doesn't allow us to do what you want to do, I don't do that. :)

If I really want to comment a list, I don't use qw(). Anything else that I might do is just added complexity that I don't need and will probably confuse later programmers.

do_something($_) for (
  'foo',
  'bar',  # introduced November, 2005
  'baz',  # deprecated - remove by December, 2006
  );

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Would Re: Build your array with push (and the other responses to the parent Build your array with push) be applicable? (As for speed I'm pretty sure YAML::Syck would be fairly quick)

It should not be to hard to implement, since there is a similar mechanism to allow comments in regular expressions with the /x modifier.

Here is a quick example of a qwx function.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

sub qwx {
    my ( $text ) = @_;
    $text =~ s/\s*[#].*$//mg;
    return split ' ', $text;
}

my @items = qwx(
'
    this
    is    # possibly
    a     # commented
    list
'
);

print Dumper \@items;
__END__
$VAR1 = [
          'this',
          'is',
          'a',
          'list'
        ];


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It might be useful to skip blank lines (or lines that just contain comments) like the real qw():

sub qwx {
    local $_ = @_ ? $_[0] : $_;
    s/[#].*$//mg;
    s/^\s+//;
    s/\s+$//;
    s/\s+/ /g;
    return split ' ', $text;
}
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Also, you could tweak the appearance of caller a little as follows:

my @items = qwx"
    this
    is    # possibly
    a     # commented
    list
";
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Single quote won't work without a space before it.

It might be useful to skip blank lines (or lines that just contain comments) like the real qw():

That won't be necessary. split with a single space is a special case that splits on any number of whitespace, including newlines.

Try it for yourself:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

sub qwx {
    my ( $text ) = @_;
    $text =~ s/\s*[#].*$//mg;
    return split ' ', $text;
}

my @items = qwx"

    this

    is    # possibly

    a     # commented

    list
    # with stand-alone comments
    # and empty lines

"
;

print Dumper \@items;
__END__
$VAR1 = [
          'this',
          'is',
          'a',
          'list'
        ];

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use strict;
no strict 'subs';

do_something($_) for (
  foo,   # comment
  bar,
  baz,
  );
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You could also use => to effectively qw all the list members. (I use keywords here to show that there's no roulette being played. They're interpreted as strings.)

do_something($_) for (
  exit => # comment
  sub =>
  exec =>
  do_something => # It's a string here, not a sub call!
);

sub do_something {
  print "Got ($_[0])\n";
}
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Keep in mind that qw and => have somewhat different rules about what they quote: qw effectively quotes each run of non-whitespace; => quotes only runs of "word" (alpha-num-underscore) characters, and interprets everything else.

---

Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

Feb 23 00:05:33 <cognominal>    recently in perlmonks someone wanted a
+ qw() that supported comments, is there an idiom for that in perl6?
Feb 23 00:06:02 <Juerd>    cognominal: <<>>, IIRC
Feb 23 00:06:43 <cognominal>    I was surprised not to see TimToady pu
+shing a Perl6 solution :)
Feb 23 00:07:10 <TimToady>    cognominal: I don't think we actually sa
+id anything about comments, but considering that it's "shell quoting"
+, and shells have comments, they could sneak in there...
Feb 23 00:07:12 <Juerd>    It could still happen
Feb 23 00:07:45 <Juerd>    TimToady: But let's not have \\\n :)
Feb 23 00:07:55 <TimToady>    Didn't see that PM thread...
Feb 23 00:08:03 <audreyt>    shells have line-terminated comments
Feb 23 00:08:13 <Juerd>    audreyt: That was implied :)
Feb 23 00:08:21 <TimToady>    So put line breaks in.
Feb 23 00:08:36 *    audreyt purrs randomly
Feb 23 00:09:51 <audreyt>    my @x = <<
Feb 23 00:09:59 <audreyt>        This is some splitted words # but not
+ this
Feb 23 00:10:05 <audreyt>        and this too # but not this
Feb 23 00:10:07 <audreyt>    >>;
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