=head1 TITLE

Require explicit m on matches, even with ?? and // as delimiters.

=head1 VERSION

  Maintainer: Nathan Torkington <gnat@frii.com>
  Date: 20 Aug 2000
  Last Modified: 15 Sep 2000
  Mailing List: perl6-language@perl.org
  Number: 135
  Version: 3
  Status: Frozen

=head1 ABSTRACT

C<?...?> and C</.../> are what makes Perl hard to tokenize.  Requiring
them to be written C<m?...?> and C<m/.../> would solve this.

=head1 CHANGES

Version 2 of this RFC redirects discussion of this topic to 
perl6-language-regex@perl.org.

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Damian Conway's Text::Balanced module does a pretty good job of
tokenizing Perl code.  However, bare C</.../> and C<?...?> require
semantic analyis to distinguish them from division and the hook
(C<A?B:C>) operator.

To remove this hassle, and thus permit programs that analyze the
source-code of other programs, I propose requiring that all matches
require an explicit C<m>.

=head1 IMPLEMENTATION

Remove the bare C</.../> and C<?...?> from the grammar :-)  When
converting perl5 programs to perl6, put the C<m> in.

=head1 REFERENCES

perl6-language message
C<200008182343.JAA00690@indy05.csse.monash.edu.au> by Damian Conway