This and other RFCs are available on the web at http://dev.perl.org/rfc/ =head1 TITLE Remove long-deprecated $* (aka $MULTILINE_MATCHING) =head1 VERSION Maintainer: Hugo van der Sanden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 29 Sep 2000 Last Modified: 30 Sep 2000 Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Number: 347 Version: 2 Status: Frozen =head1 ABSTRACT The magic $* variable (known in English as $MULTILINE_MATCHING) has been deprecated for years. It is time to kill it. =head1 DESCRIPTION In days of yore, you would set $* to 1 to achieve in all regexps the same as you can now achieve on a per-regexp basis with the /m flag. Nowadays, when most perl programmers have never heard of it, it is an accident waiting to happen and requires ugly additional cruft for the defensive programmer to avoid. The particular danger of $* is its 'action at a distance' effect: as a global variable, its effect reaches into and out of scopes that we normally expect to protect us. =head1 MIGRATION The long deprecation cycle helps here. p52p6 should complain and die if it sees any attempt to set $* or $MULTILINE_MATCHING to a non-zero value, or any attempt to alias it other than in English. It should silently (or maybe with a warning) ignore any attempt to set it to a zero value, and silently (or maybe with a warning) replace any attempt to read it with a constant undef. =head1 IMPLEMENTATION This only simplifies the regexp engine, and should help fix some longstanding bugs in the scope of /m. There is a bit of work to do to extricate it, but nothing seriously difficult. =head1 REFERENCES perlvar manpage for discussion of $*
