> The removal of the flip-flop operator
Well that never happened. It was deprecated with the intention to remove it, but they backtracked: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/5400#note-25
Re:Ruby One-Liners
by faitswulff on Saturday September 14, 2019 @08:34AM
(#20970395)
I'm glad Ruby takes community feedback seriously, for the most part - most recently the pipeline operator and the named block parameters, for instance.
I heard Matz is going to remove the Perl special variables in Ruby 3.0. Can't think what the fuss is all about. They're pretty useful in command-line Ruby. I moved from Perl to Ruby so I will be sad to see this bit of Perl heritage removed from Ruby. I mean for what gain?
Only a very small subset of them: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/14240
$/ input record separator (default argument for "gets")
$\ output record separator ("print" prints it at last)
$, default separator for Array#join and print
$; default separator for String#split
The removal of the flip-flop operator, which is a fundamental tool in text processing, sent a very clear signal about the Ruby direction (that is, to be "The Rails language" and nothing else).
How can one be sure now, that all the functionality you've mentioned (and more) won't be removed as well?
Perl can be ugly, but its foundation in text processing are established.