> > My personal feeling is that I'd love "use English" to be expunged from
> > the language altogether - it's unnecessary bloat that only increases the
> > number of mistakes that people can make. But I'm not sure if I have the
> > guts to write that RFC just yet. ;-)
>
> Are you talking about the overlong variable names?
>
> Aliasing -X is being proposed through a 'use english;' mechanism.
Yes, but perhaps a little bit of both. Truthfully, I've always seen long
alternatives as useless bloat, not used widely over the long term. Once
people learn the shortcuts, they use them.
Expunging "use English" may will improve Perl syntax, since it's one
less way to do things with already dubious value. Yes, the overlong
variable names are a waste of time, IMO, because I've never seen them
used in "real code". It's almost a rite of passage to take off the
training wheels and use the "real names" of the variables. Who wants to
write $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR when you can write $/ ?
I'm not vehemently opposed to "use English", or even the long
alternatives to -r and -w that RFC 290 proposes. But I do think,
truthfully:
1. They don't solve the real syntactic problems
2. Very few people will ever use them long-term
So if they bloat the language, we should consider expunging them. They
certainly bloat Camel with duplicate definitions. And I consider the
mneumonic of $! much stronger than $ERRNO (or was that $OS_ERROR or
$SYS_ERROR or ??)
Personally, my stance is that we should all come to accept that we use
and love a language with a syntax that drives many people mad. Not
everyone's gonna like Perl, so I think we should just accept it and move
on.
-Nate
