Doing Nothing Better in Perl 5

Perl 6 has three code placeholder operators, known affectionately as the "yada, yada, yada" operator (see List Prefix Precedence in Synopsis 3). It's a matter of (very sarcastic) public record how much I love writing, maintaining, and patching parsers, so I've just sent a very preliminary five-line patch to p5p to add support for<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... to Perl 5.

--- perly.y~    2008-05-09 17:47:35.000000000 -0700
+++ perly.y    2008-05-09 17:47:41.000000000 -0700
@@ -1227,6 +1227,11 @@
             }
     |    WORD
     |    listop
+    |    DOTDOT
+            {
+              $$ = newUNOP(OP_DIE, 0,
+                  newSVOP(OP_CONST, 0, newSVpvs("Unimplemented")))
+            }
     ;

<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/* "my" declarations, with optional attributes */

Apply this to recentish bleadperl sources, run perl regen_perly.pl, rebuild, and now you can run programs such as:

sub foo {<nobr> <wbr></nobr>... }
foo();

And get an "Unimplemented at file line line." error message.

(Now everyone who complains that I don't code enough to match my talk, please punch yourself in the face.)

Syndicated 2008-05-10 02:24:04 from pudge