Re: [Fun With Perl] What does this do?

["Bill Jones" <bill@fccj.org>]

>From: "Juanma Barranquero" <barranquero@laley-actualidad.es>
> 
> On Thu, 17 Jun 1999 12:15:13 -0400, "Bill Jones" <bill@fccj.org>
> wrote:
>
>>It should be a syntax error in that the last \E belongs to
>>the LAST \U
>
> That still doesn't explain why it fails just by adding a \l that
> shouldn't affect \U or \L (but it does, by way of the reordering that
> MJD has brought to our attention).
>
>>The FIRST \L lost it's macro closure \E in the reordering...
>
> The perlop manpage says:
>
>  \L  Lowercase till \E
>  \U  Uppercase till \E
>  \E  End case modification
>
> Nowhere I read that they should be properly nested and that is not
> correct to "open" several levels of \L and \U and close them all with
> a single \E. In fact,
>
>> print "\Ude LOS sus OJOS tan FUERTEMENTE llorando, \LGIRABA la CABEZA \Uy
> ESTABALOS mirando\E";
>> DE LOS SUS OJOS TAN FUERTEMENTE LLORANDO, giraba la cabeza Y ESTABALOS
MIRANDO
>
> it works till you put a \l or \u next to an inner \U or \L (and, I
> suppose, the automatic reordering kicks in).

It's a 'unintentional feature'.  I am sure a search of DejaNews
would turn up a long winded discuss - circa 1997-ish - where
this 'bug' was posted and 'disussed' at that time.

I say 'discussed' because at that time EVERYBODY seemed to be
cussin' at everybody else and the 'buggy feature' was posted
but generally lost in the noise of the next few months.

The main thread(s) during that time was -

Being Kind to Kind Beings...'  or some such.

At anyrate the docs should say that \l (lowercased command-like
macros) should have a \e macro ending, but it doesn't.  But I
believe somewhere in the reordering \E becomes implied and
'attached' to the last evaluated \littleLetter command and
therefore mismatched with the next \bigLetter command...

HTH,
-Sneex-  :]
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