From: Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan <jeffp@...>
Date: 2002-02-12T08:51:14+09:00
Subject: Re: [newbie] make first letter lowercase

On Feb 11, Tobias Reif said:

>sebi wrote:
>
>> sorry for this very simple question, but how would i turn the first
>> letter of a string into lowercase?
>
>class String
>
>   def upcase_first
>     out = self.dup
>     out[0,1] = out[0,1].upcase

Ick.  Am I the only one that finds that syntax a little disappointing?  I
would much rather be able to say

  out[0,1].upcase!

or even

  out[0].upcase!

Now, as far as the first one goes, yes, I know out[0,1] creates a COPY of
the first character of the string, and I know that out[0] returns a
FixNum, but still... there's something that screams "too much work" to me.

It's probably because there's no concept of pointers here.  I've been
thinking of implementing pointer-like things into Perl, but I'm not sure
how useful they would be.

-- 
Jeff "japhy" Pinyan      japhy@pobox.com      http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/
RPI Acacia brother #734   http://www.perlmonks.org/   http://www.cpan.org/
** Look for "Regular Expressions in Perl" published by Manning, in 2002 **
<stu> what does y/// stand for?  <tenderpuss> why, yansliterate of course.
[  I'm looking for programming work.  If you like my work, let me know.  ]