Juerd wrote:
Audrey cleverly suggested that changing the second character would also
work, and that has many more glyphs available. So she came up with
and propose ".:" as a solution
$xyzzy.:foo();
$fooz. :foo();
$foo. :foo();
This would make the enormous semantic difference between:
foo. :bar()
and:
foo :bar()
depend on a visual difference of about four pixels. :-(
We've strived to eliminate homonyms from Perl 6. I'd much rather not introduce
one at this late stage.
For similar reasons, I'm strongly opposed to:
foo. ?bar()
foo. +bar()
foo. *bar()
since they're highly misleading if you happen to miss the dot.
Damian
PS: While I can understand the appeal to laziness, I'm not at all convinced
by the argument:
> And it's a lot of work (many, many keystrokes!)
> to go back and change something.
In vim, the exact number of keystrokes to realign the long dots of N lines
is 7+N. And, if I found myself doing that regularly, I'd turn it into a
macro and bind it to a key, so the number of keystrokes would be one.
We need to be careful not to require the language to solve problems that
are better solved with tools.
