A recent outbreak of spam uses simple subject lines like $2137, $93857, and so on. This "spam virus" has been around for a few weeks, and it has hit me a few times now. The values appear to be monotonically increasing.
With the first of these messages, I thought that's a hell of a lot of match variables. The values are now much larger than what I saw previously, and I caught myself thinking, even Perl6 grammars won't need that many match variables. Someone must be trying to debug a stupidly complex regex...
Re:But REAL Perl geeks...
ziggy on 2004-07-21T16:31:32
Really?$m = "(.)" x 26;
join("", a..z) =~ m/$m/;
print "$26\n";Re:But REAL Perl geeks...
Juerd on 2004-07-21T22:50:24
I stand corrected but,... recall vividly that I once needed $10, which didn't exist. @- and @+ weren't there yet. ... thought perlvar explicitly mentioned that there were only one digit. It appears that I misread.
Strange.Re:But REAL Perl geeks...
merlyn on 2004-07-22T14:58:15
There was a "backward compatibility" mode introduced into Perl3 to protect Perl2 programs that had presumed that \15 would be parsed as "\1" followed by 5. If 10 parens had not yet been seen, the old interpretation was used -- otherwise, the new interpretation would be used instead. Maybe that's what you were remembering.
