Character class shortcuts used to be easy because ASCII was easy. Either of those were easy if ASCII was what you wanted, but quite limiting otherwise. Perl v5.6 introduced Unicode support and the world started to change.
A good programmer is always trying to eliminate ambiguity. Their code should work the same way everywhere, but character class shortcuts can’t guarantee that anymore. I wrote about these a bit in Know your character classes for The Effective Perler.
Continue reading “The evolution of character class shortcuts”