Re: [Perl/perl5] 502da7: make /p a no-op

[email protected] (Leon Timmermans) Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:56:13 +0100

Newsgroups	perl.perl5.changes,perl.perl5.porters
Message-ID	<CAHhgV8gin1Ob0b6tus2tY2E1oMXPQzfU-4AV0-XsrhirPKUiUg@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Feb 12, 2026 at 10:57 AM demerphq <[email protected]> wrote:

> You sure this doesn't make while /g matches go quadratic? Lastly I checked
> /p still matters for while/g -- the COW stuff doesn't always kick in: Not
> every string can be COWed. Iirc strings returned from <>/readline aren't
> COWed.
>

I was recently made aware of another related issue: string from File::Map
can't COW[1]. And given that they can be very very large that is a serious
problem. I don't think PL_sawampersand is as useless as some people thought
it was.

Leon

1: https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=167860