Re6: Memory Use/Garbage Collection: Java vs Perl

[John M. Dlugosz]

Am I correct in my (I'm not sure if it's a memory of something I read somewhere, or an assumption I have formed) that Perl will fold string constants?

Apparently it does not.

perl -MO=Deparse,-q -e"print qq(I am $x\n) . 'and fold this?'"

it taken as

print(('I am ' . $x . "\n") . 'and fold this?');

not print('I am ' . $x . "\nand fold this?").

—John

[jsprat]

True, but

perl -MO=Deparse,-q -e "print 'Hello, ' . 'World'"

Is parsed as

print 'Hello, World';
-e syntax OK

Apparently, the example you gave was more complex than the parser wanted to deal with.

Update Added -q, as John pointed out below...

[John M. Dlugosz]

You forgot the -q, so the string folding is done by Deparse's formatting, totally hiding what you were trying to detect.

Trying it with, it seems that's still indeed working. A few other quick tests, and it seems that the presence of interpolation prevents the merging, rather than merging the tail-end piece as you would expect.

Any perl hacker want to comment?

—John