Jira (PUP-2972) Implementation of +=/-= is potentially confusing

[Andy Parker (JIRA)]

Title: Message Title

Andy Parker commented on an issue   Re: Implementation of +=/-= is potentially confusing A short conversation on puppet-dev came to the same conclusion as the filer of this ticket. The = and = operators are more confusing than they are worth. With the changes in the future parser, where they are now just synonyms for the + and - operators plus assignment, there is no need to keep them. Since = only ever existed in the future parser, dropping it is not a concern. Dropping support for = is a small concern, but it is so seldom used and there are other ways of achieving the same goals: Translations for += when used with Strings: use interpolation (e.g. {{$a = "$a$b" }}). Arrays: in the future parser (4x language) simply use + (e.g. $a = $a + $b), in the current parser (3x language) use a custom function such as concat from stdlib (e.g. $a = concat($a, $b) (WARNING: some versions of stdlib's concat will modify the arrays causing this to change the outer scope $a). Hashes: in the future parser (4x language) simply use + (e.g. $a = $a + $b), in the current parser (3x language) use a custom function such as merge from stdlib (e.g. $a = merge($a, $b). Add Comment   Puppet / PUP-2972 Implementation of +=/-= is potentially confusing It seems to me that += and -= are more confusing than useful, and I would argue that they simply shouldn't exist. Right now (with "--parser future"), these operators implicitly create a new variable that may shadow one from an outer scope, appending/removing the RHS to the outer scope variable if it exists. If the variable has already been defined in t... This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA (v6.1.4#6159-sha1:44eaede) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Bugs" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to puppet-bugs+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to puppet-bugs@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-bugs. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.