Re^3: What operator prepends?

[Tanktalus]

First off, "= [...] ." isn't an operator as per the original topic. That's two operators. ;-)

However, more importantly, this is just not how I mentally think of creating a string. If I want to generate a string such as "this is the output", I don't think about starting with the string "output" and prepending a bunch of stuff. I think about how to create "this", then I think of how to create "is", etc. It's actually quite rare that I'll want to generate "the" before I generate "is". In fact, I often end up with code like this:

my @text;

push @text, generate_this();
push @text, generate_is();
push @text, generate_the_output();

return join ' ', @text;

That's just how I think of the string, and I find that when my code matches the problem in my head, it's far less likely to have bugs in it. Especially expensive design bugs.

[swampyankee]

I also tend to create my strings from left to right, probably because that's how I tend to write. I add stuff to the end -- push vs unshift -- so a "prepend" operator is not something I would think to include in a language design.

Perhaps inaccurately, I don't think of .= the "append" operator; I think of it as an abbreviation for $string = $string . $more.