On 8/18/06, Larry Wall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 12:56:30PM +0300, Markus Laire wrote:
: What about combined short switches like C-abc to mean C-a -b -c?
: Will perl6 support this notation or not?
Hmm, that opens up a world of hurt. Either you have to distinguish a
--abc from -abc, or you have to have some kind of fallback heuristic,
and it doesn't work terribly well with arguments in any case except
for the final one. Should probably make it possible, just because the
external interface is one of the places where Perl has always tried
to be accommodating to existing culture rather than revisionist.
We can probably work something out here, along the lines of:
if there's only one -
if single character aliases are defined
if the word matches that alphabet
if the word doesn't match any longer names
At first I was inclined to say that if there's a *% then all the
unrecognized go in there and you can parse the -abc yourself, but
that doesn't tell you how to treat the next argument unless we look
at the definition of -c anyway. We can't just say that -c's arg
must use the -c=arg form, since even Perl 5 violates that with -e. :/
Larry
Yep, I understand it's not an easy question.
Still I was thinking of behaviour where C-abc would allways mean
C-a -b -c regardless of what 1-char aliases or longer names have
been defined. This would make --abc and -abc mean completely different
things.
And in this proposal only the last switch would be able to get an
argument, e.g. with C-abc=99 or C-abc 99 or something like that.
If this can't be the default behaviour, then it would be nice to be
able to easily switch to this kind of behaviour.
ps. Then there's the perl5-behaviour of perl -n0e unlink where also
the intervening switches can get arguments. This could be expanded so
that all chars for which there's no 1-char alias defined, are
parameters. So C-aHellobWorld would mean C-a=Hello -b=World if
there are 1-char aliases only for a b. ;)
--
Markus Laire
