Name the secret operator

[Philippe Bruhat]

Hi,

while doing some research for a talk on Perl secret operators, I tried
to find who first coined the term "secret operator".

I found a post from Greg Allen on February 2004 on this very list
(http://groups.google.com/group/perl.fwp/msg/e62668a760de1652),
and then a post by Abigail on comp.lang.perl.misc on January 2003
(http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.perl.misc/msg/22cfcd81a1521ec4).

Does anyone know of an earlier occurence of the term?

Now that I have seen Abigail's post on clpm, I want to know its name.
It is the longest secret operator I've seen, and also the only one
that must be on three lines (not counting the content).

<<m=~m>>
(commented out code and pod goes here)
m
;

I have a few ideas for names, but they don't fit very well, and do not
describe the "m\n;" part of the operator.

--
Philippe Bruhat (BooK)

Putting beauty before brains is the surest way to wind up with neither.
(Moral from Groo The Wanderer #24 (Epic))

[Michael G Schwern]

Philippe Bruhat (BooK) wrote:
> Hi,
>
> while doing some research for a talk on Perl secret operators, I tried
> to find who first coined the term "secret operator".
>
> I found a post from Greg Allen on February 2004 on this very list
> (http://groups.google.com/group/perl.fwp/msg/e62668a760de1652),
> and then a post by Abigail on comp.lang.perl.misc on January 2003
> (http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.perl.misc/msg/22cfcd81a1521ec4).
>
> Does anyone know of an earlier occurence of the term?

Simon Cozens uses the term "double-secret operator" (a reference to Animal
House) in a perl.com article on June 6, 2003. But it's not really an
FWP-style secret operator and it's after Abigail anyway.
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/06/06/regexps.html

--
Stabbing you in the face for your own good.