On Fri, May 18, 2001 at 08:31:21AM -0500, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
> On Fri, May 18, 2001 at 06:22:10AM -0700, Austin Hastings wrote:
> >
> > --- Damian Conway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > > It's probably just a matter of coding what you actually mean.
> > > In Perl 5 and 6 your version means "if $fh is true in *any*
> > > possible way...", whereas you seem to want "if $fh is defined",
> > > which is:
> >
> > Hmm. I can easily see this producing incomprehensible code when spread
> > across large systems. To wit, those developers used to "0 means false"
>
> Any feature is incomprehensible if one is not used to it. Pointers
> in C are incomprehensible if one has never met the concept before.
Right, consider overloading.
> As far as I understand one rationale behind the "false (in Perl 5 terms)
> but true (in Perl 6 terms)" is that you can write code like this
>
> if ($retval = func(@args)) {
> # it worked ...
Right. Which of course can be done in Perl 5 with either "0 but true" (or "0E0")
or if the value is an object, the use of overloading.
Graham.
