On Monday 07 November 2005 03:51 pm, Juerd wrote: > Andrew Rodland skribis 2005-11-07 13:30 (-0500): > > If you want to get into personal beliefs, I think that function > > signatures are such a complexity quagmire -- and that they're line-noise > > ugly to boot. > > The nice thing about signatures is that they let you write what you > mean. This saves you an entire translation from what you mean to some > Perl code that manipulates @_. This translation is hard, and error > prone, as is the code that comes from it.
Sorry, I wasn't clear here, so I hope you don't mind my cutting you off. What I meant wasn't "signatures are too much complexity" -- they're not; they're simply doing something useful -- but rather "too much complexity is getting thrown into signatures" to the point where the gain isn't so much, but the complexity starts creeping in, and you need a book just for everyday tasks. Combined with what seems to me like a thoroughly unreadable syntax, function signatures are starting to look like a brand new version of the regex mess that p6 ditched in favor of the more consistent, more readable patterns. I'm going to stop going on about this one way or another, but I just wanted to make myself clear first. Andrew
