Re: RFC 164 (v1) Replace =~, !~, m//, and s/// with match() and subst()

[Nathan Wiger]

Tom Christiansen wrote:
> 
> There are thirteen years of precedent, not to mention the millions of users,
> who are completely accustomed to writing expressions like
> 
>     next if /\s+/ || /\w+/;
> 
> It's nearly part of Perl's language signature.  I wouldn't count
> on this going away if you still think to call this "Perl".  It is
> of course much more likely in the renamed "Frob" language, however.

First off, this argument is just a little too grandiose, because if we
can't change anything because of precedent, then we're stuck and Perl 6
should just be Perl 5.9 instead.

That being said, I don't see why this wouldn't work still. As I noted in
an email to Scott, at the very least this will work:

   next if m/\s+/ || m/\w+/;

And if we want to special case // still that's fine with me.

-Nate