Perl6 RFC Librarian writes:
> =head1 TITLE
>
> Less line noise - let's get rid of @%
I have some problems with this RFC:
* you misunderstand the purpose of $ and @, which is to indicate
singular vs plural. You say a $ indicates a string or number,
but really it indicates a single thing. Similarly @ isn't just
a variable marker, it's used to indicate that you get multiple
things:
@foo[2..10]
@$foo
* current typing provides rudimentary compile-type checking.
Saying:
$foo = (1,3,5);
gives a warning. Saying:
%foo = "Nat";
gives a warning. You'd lose that. To get it back you'd need
verbally-typed variables:
$foo :scalar = (1,3,5); # to get the warning
and even then it's not necessarily going to be possible to make
that elicit a warning at compile-time.
* no sample code. If you're proposing something as big as this,
I *really* want to see how it's going to change the language.
Take an existing 30 line program that does lots of work with
variables and convert it. Show me how it affects things like
slices. I want to make sure that code that is currently easy
doesn't become hard.
* you complain that @foo will become more meaningless once we have
different data structures that act as collections. You don't
consider using @foo for those, though:
my @foo : FIFO = (4,5);
This fits in with my personal vision of how Perl6 will handle
new data types: better support for tie, basically. You can plug
in your own C or Perl code to implement new types that masquerade
as scalars, arrays, or hashes. Someone else suggested this in
the thread, and you treated it as already dealt with in the RFC,
but I don't think it's dealt with at all. I can't see how saying
my @foo : SOME_TYPE_THAT_IMPLEMENTS_ARRAY_OPERATORS = (4,5);
is going to debase the meaning of '@'.
Nat
