On Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 02:11:29PM +0800, Autrijus Tang wrote:
: On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 10:03:45PM -0800, Larry Wall wrote:
: > Hmm, well, if it got that far. Given strict being on by default,
: > this particular example should probably just die on the fact that $"
: > isn't declared, since there's no $" in Perl 6.
:
: Is $" okay as a variable name? Is everything from perlvar.pod legal? :)
Considering nobody's written perlvar.pod for Perl 6 yet, yeah, everything
in that pod is legal. :-)
: my $" = 3;
:
: Pugs parses that because it only considers $! and $/ as legal
: symbolic variable names.
$! will be a legal variable name. $/ is going away, as is $", which
means they fail under "use strict", but they'd still autocreate
globals under laxity as Perl 5 does. (I know Perl 5 exempted all
special variables from strict, but I don't see why we have to do
that for Perl 6. Merely having $_ in the lexical scope or $*! in the
global scope should be sufficient declaration to get around strict.
Though perhaps we can exempt people from having to write $*! under
strict. In fact, that probably goes for all predeclared $* names,
so $IN is legal for $*IN as long as you don't have "my $IN" hiding
it. Another way to look at it is that * variables are basically
autodeclared "our" implicitly in the outermost lexical scope.)
Sigh, I'd better rough it all in here, even if I don't have time to
do a good job on it. Maybe somebody can beat this into a real S28 pod.
$? and $@ are gone, merged in with $!. (Frees up ? twigil for $?FOO
syntax.) $^E is merged too. $! is an object with as much info as
you'd like on the current exception (unthrown outside of CATCH, thrown
inside). Unthrown exceptions are typically interesting values of undef.
$$ is now $*PID. ($$foo is now unambuous.)
$0 is gone in favor of $*PROGRAM_NAME or some such.
Anything that varied with the selected output filehandle like $|
is now a method on that filehande, and the variables don't exist.
(The p5-to-p6 translator will probably end up depending on some
$Perl5ish::selected_output_filehandle variable to emulate Perl 5's
single-arg select().) Likewise $/ and $. should be attached to
a particular input filehandle. (In fact, $/ is now the result of
the last regular expression match, though we might keep the idea of
$. around in some form or other just because it's awfully handy for
error messages. But the localizing $. business is yucky. We have
to clean that up.)
All the special format variables ($%, $=, $-, $:, $~, $^, $^A, $^L)
are gone. (Frees up the = twigil for %= POD doc structures and
old __DATA__ stream, the : twigil for private attributes, and the ~
twigil for autodeclared parameters.)
$`, $', and $+ don't exist any more, but you can dig that info out
of $/'s structures. Shortcuts into $/ include $1, $2, and such, and
the newfangled $<foo> things. Also, $& is changed to $0 for the whole
matched string. $` and $' may be $<pre> and $<post>, but you probably
have to explicitly match <pre> and <post> to get them remembered,
so we don't have a repeat of the Perl 5 sawampersand fiasco. <pre>
and <post> would automatically exclude themselves from $0. Or you
need some special flag to remember them, maybe.
%+ and %- are gone. $0, $1, $2, etc. are all objects that know
where they .start and .end. (Mind you, those methods return magical
positions that are Unicode level independent.)
$* and $# have been deprecated half of forever and are gone. $[
is a fossil that I suppose could turn into an evil pragma, if we
try to translate it at all. (Frees up * twigil for $*FOO syntax.)
$(, $), $<, and $> should all change to various $*FOO names. $] is either
something in $* or a trait of the Perl namespace. Likewise $^V, if
they aren't in fact merged.
${...} is reserved for hard refs only now. ($::(...) must be used
for symbolics refs.) ${^foo} should just change to $*foo or $*_foo
or some such.
$; is gone because the multidim hash hack is gone. $" is gone,
replaced by @foo.join(":") or some such. Likewise for $, in print
statements.
We never did find a use for $}, thank goodness.
And we still are keeping $_ around, though it's lexically scoped.
Let's see, what other damage can we do to perlvar. $a and $b are
no longer special. No bareword filehandles. $*IN, $*OUT, $*ERR.
Args come in @*ARGS rather than @ARGV. (Environment still in %ENV,
will wonders never cease.) I don't know whether @INC and %INC will
make as much sense when we're looking installed modules in a database,
though I suppose you still have to let the user add places to look.
%SIG is now %*SIG. The __DIE__ and __WARN__ hooks should be brought
out as separate &*ON_DIE and &*ON_WARN variables--they really
have nothing to do with signals. I suppose we could even do away
with %SIG and replace it with &*ON_SIGINT and such, though then we'd
lose a bit of signal introspection which would have to be provided
some other way. Oh, and we probably ought to split out &?ON_PARSEERROR
from $*ON_DIE to get rid of the $^S fiasco of Perl 5.
$^C, $^D, $^F, $^I, $^M, $^O, $^P, $^S, $^T, $^V, $^X are all renamed
to something $*FOOish, at least the ones that aren't going away entirely.
$^W is is too blunt an instrument even in Perl 5, so it's probably gone.
I'm not quite sure what to do with $^N or $^R yet. Most likely they
end up as something $<foo>ish, if they stay.
You weren't ever supposed to know about $^H and %^H. Or %{^FNORD}...
Other things might show up as global variables in support of
command-line options, like $*ARGVOUT or @*F. Some of the special
variables we've blissfull relegated to the trash heap might
creep back in as global variables that just happen to know about
$*Perl5ish::current_selected_filehandle and such, but we should
probably try to keep them as lvalue subs in &Perl5ish::ors() and such.
Anyway, it's all negotiable, except for the parts that aren't.
Larry
