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in reply to Re: Recursive substitution
in thread Recursive substitution

Thanks very much. I realised shortly after posting that I hadn't explained why I didn't want the most natural answer (current explanation: because I don't, that's why), but didn't update my post in time.

By the way, I think that s/$pat/$sub/ is (effectively) a no-op unless m/$pat/, so I think that it's redundant to do a separate m/$pat/ check.

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Re^3: Recursive substitution
by bobf (Monsignor) on Nov 10, 2009 at 04:44 UTC

    it's redundant to do a separate m/$pat/ check
    You are absolutely correct, of course. I started playing with patterns that would have required the extra check (because the ones used in s/// and m// were different), but I failed to remove the extra code after changing my approach. I added a note to my original reply but left the crufty code to avoid confusing future readers of this thread.