Perl's @foo[3,7,1,-1] ?

[Brian Quinlan]

MRAB wrote:
> Brian Quinlan wrote:
>> kj wrote:
>>> In <slrnh37t2p.63e.nick at irishsea.home.craig-wood.com> Nick Craig-Wood 
>>> <nick at craig-wood.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> However I can't think of the last time I wanted to do this - array
>>>> elements having individual purposes are usually a sign that you should
>>>> be using a different data structure.
>>>
>>> In the case I was working with, was a stand-in for the value returned
>>> by some_match.groups().  The match comes from a standard regexp
>>> defined elsewhere and that captures more groups than I need.  (This
>>> regexp is applied to every line of a log file.)
>>>
>>> kj
>>
>> The common idiom for this sort of thing is:
>>
>> _, _, _, val1, _, _, _, val2, ..., val3 = some_match.groups()
>>
> Alternatively:
> 
>     val1, val2, val3 = some_match.group(4, 8, something)

Actually, now that I think about it, naming the groups seems like it 
would make this code a lot less brittle.

Cheers,
Brian