Perl mode and y=>

Perl mode and y=>

[Mark Tilford]

For some reason, Perl mode behaves oddly whenever it hits the syntax
"y => " (it thinks stuff after that is still quoted), which is used
frequently in Imager (
http://search.cpan.org/~tonyc/Imager-0.85/lib/Imager/Draw.pod#getscanline()
)
I have to replace that with "'y' =>" or "'y', ".  "x =>" or "z =>"
does not cause this problem.

1)  Any idea why?
2)  Could somebody fix this?

Re: Perl mode and y=>

[S Boucher]

----- Original Message -----

> For some reason, Perl mode behaves oddly

Perl is... odd.  I've used perl for a long time with emacs.  You just learn to live with the problems.

Perl's syntax has too many cases of context sensitive interpretations of characters.  It's just hell to make emacs capable to deal with all this.  I suspect Perl is the only software capable of parsing perl code :-)

If it's any consolation, we managed to convince Larry Wall back in the days when perl 5 was being "designed" to not follow Tom Christiansen's idea of what the scope operator should be. Tom wanted the single quote. Most prefered C++'s :: for familiarity and friendlyness to parsers.  If you think things are bad now, imagine having the single quote has the scope operator :-)