Carl Mäsak wrote:
Darren (>):
Bit
Blob
Set
Bag
Mapping
How does one write anonymous value literals of those types? And I mean
directly, not by writing a literal of some other type and using a conversion
function to derive the above?
Why is the latter method insufficient for your needs?
I consider these types to be just as fundamental as the others I mentioned, some
more so, and it should be possible to define their values in a manner that is
just as clean and terse.
In my mind, having to gain one of the above values by converting to it from some
other type using a function, seems as stupid as having to write a Str literal
and use a strtoint function to get an Int value, when it makes more sense to
just have special syntax for an Int in the first place.
Besides-which, I don't even see any converter functions defined to derive these
from other types.
At the very least I want to know the tersest and cleanest thing I can write, for
each of the above 5 types, that will give me a value of that type.
As one suggestion for a Blob syntax if they don't already exist, is something
derived from both the syntaxes for character strings and numbers:
0b'1100101110' # 1 bit represented per sourcecode char
0o'62' # 3 bits represented per sourcecode char
0x'50B7168E' # 4 bits represented per sourcecode char
Also, the catenation operator "~" and friends should also be defined for Blob.
I'm not as sure what to suggest for the other 4 types, though I suppose in a
pinch they could look less special, like "Set{...}", "Bag{...}", "Mapping{...}"
with the contents of the braces like what you'd get declaring a Hash literal.
The point is, I'd like some sort of statement (which can be changed later) from
@Larry in the Synopsis so that I know how to write Perl 6 code that declares
(and addresses elements of where applicable) literals of the above types, and
also so that implementations like Rakudo have guidance to make them work.
Note, in general I like the distinctive syntax, say, of having [] for ordered
collections and {} for unordered collections, as is already the case for Array
and Hash, for both value declaration and element addressing.
-- Darren Duncan
