Here's a stupid bug.
Suppose you want to check if a number is either 70 or 73, and your duct-tape-and-chewing gum production environment is stuck in the stone age without the smart-match operator.
You might be tempted to write foo() if $num =~ /^70|73$/, as I did. Oops. That will match 70 and 73, but also anything that ends in 73, like 173 or 273 or foo73. /^(?:70|73)$/ fixes it.
The moral of the story: life sucks without smartmatch.
Mike Friedman is a professional computer programmer living and working in the New York City area.
Um, wouldn't it be even better to write
foo() if $num == 70 or $num == 73;
What Aaron P. said. Isn't a regex (and a complex one with an 'or' pipe in it no less) a lot more overhead than two simple numeric equality comparisons?
More overheard, but easier to read (IMHO. I know a lot of people vociferously disagree.)
Or if you can’t even install List::MoreUtils, just use core only:
That is what a smart match amounts to as well, of course.
Maybe it is a feature instead of bug?
Well, as long as we're having fun:
bar() if 0==($num*($num-143)+5110)I might as well put in my 2¢
$num =~ /^7[03]$/;How would have smart-matching have prevented that?
foo() if $num =~ /^(70|73)$/;
@brian, if smart match were available I would have written
foo() if $num ~~ [ 70, 73 ]instead of habitually reaching for a regex.