This and other RFCs are available on the web at http://dev.perl.org/rfc/ =head1 TITLE Open-ended slices =head1 VERSION Maintainer: Simon Cozens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 24 Sep 2000 Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Number: 282 Version: 1 Status: Developing =head1 ABSTRACT The dreaded C<@array[$foo...]> rears its ugly head again. =head1 DESCRIPTION How many times have you wanted B<just> the last two return values from a function? And how many times have you got frustrated that you can't work out how many things there are in a list and you have to decant it to an array: @thingy = function() for (@thingy[3..$#thingy]) { ... } Horrible, isn't it? People want something better. I thought about it last year or so, and produced a couple of patches. It seemed then that the right syntax was not, for instance: (function())[3...-1] because sometimes you want C<$x..$y> to return the empty list, but actually: (function())[3...] (Or C<[3..]>. It doesn't matter.) Someone else on Perl5-Porters wanted this recently too, so it isn't just me. =head1 IMPLEMENTATION It's new syntax, so it isn't going to break anything, and I did produce patches against 5.6, so it is possible. It's a question of adding another rule to the grammar, which flags that the slice should be computed at run time. =head1 REFERENCES None.
