Re^2: What operator should perl5porters use for safe dereferencing?

[perl-diddler]

I'm surprised at the number of lazy answer types on here "~>"? "~" is used in the context of binary NOT, or pattern matching. Neither has anything to do with conditional pointer referencing. you want to choose something, ideally, that makes sense in the language.

Going from it being a conditional expression, the idea of a question mark naturally comes to mind as in a conditional statement like "x?a:b", here, you are questioning if the pointer is valid, if yes, do "->", implicitly, in the no case, the answer is "undef", so the ":undef part becomes superfluous. So "?->" seems clear to me.

While it is in 2nd place, it's amazing how laziness outranks logic almost 3:1 -- (more general population would probably choose lazy over logical 10:1 I'd bet...)