On Sunday 13 May 2007 15:42:30 Thomas Wittek wrote: > What makes Perl hard to read is the excessive use of special characters > (/\W/).
It also makes Mandarin and other ideographic languages impossible to read. As evidence I admit that, though I am very smart, *I* can't read them. (Try to ignore the billion-plus people who can.) > Global variables with cryptic names, that no beginner can make any sense > of by reading it. And after not working with "$<" for some months I > can't remember it either, although I've got quite some Perl experience. Most of those have gone away. > Additionally I'm not a friend of sigils: I'm not a friend of potential conflicts between built-in operators and my identifier names (and especially the conflicts between scalar, aggregate, type, and function names). > I would also like semicolons to be optional. There are far more cases of > single line statements than multiline statements. So you would save > quite some characters, when the semicolon would be optional and you > could concatenate multiline statements with e.g. a backslash. When (smart) people talk about Python's whitespace problem, they don't mean *horizontal* whitespace. > Some say that there are too much operators in Perl(6). I partially > agree. That's like saying there are too many function calls in Scheme. Perl's an operator-oriented language! > People not only want code that _is_ sexy, but they also want it to > _look_ sexy. You'll have to find me more than a handful of Dylan hackers to start to convince me of that! -- c
