Sarcasm aside, I am glad to see someone else came up with the same idea. I would not consider it to be 'cute', a 'tour of force' possibly, yes.

Actually this idea comes up fairly often, I think both myself and Eric have been fairly resistant to the idea in our respective libraries. There is certainly no technical issue in implementing such a series of operators. Personally though I find these a little too cryptic for my taste; I prefer to see things spelt out in full so that a programmer coming new to the code can have half a chance of understanding it, rather than seeing some weird kind of operator abuse. I would also like to encourage folks to compile their expressions once, and then reuse them many times (perhaps from multiple threads) rather than use an overloaded operator that interprets the string anew each time it's encountered. There is also the problem that C++ operators don't map 1:1 to Perl operators, so we have to "abuse" the syntax somewhat. Having said that, since it's clear that this is a personal preference issue, if you can come up with a coherent set of operators and their semantics, then lets look at this again, and maybe at least experiment with the idea. John.