On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, Matthew Brooks wrote:
> I haven't had the chance to attend any of the Perl6 discussions yet. So I've
> been following it from a distance... a looooonnnnnnnggggg distance ;)
that's funny i can read this just fine. how far away could you be?
> >From what I can tell (correct me if I'm wrong... PLEASE!) Larry is actually
> considering (or should I say, has already decided) to change $obj->method()
> to $obj.method() in Perl6.
that's right it looks like -> is dead. i can only speculate but i think he
is turned off by the -> operator because it is a hack from c/c++ that was
used to overcome presidence of the . versus the * operator. if you don't
know c/c++ e.g.:
*foo.x /*is not going to work*/
(*foo).x /*is cumbersome but is what you mean*/
foo->x /*is a hack to solve this*/
we don't have this problem in perl though so maybe that's not why he
doesn't like it. admitedly it is a silly operator (especially given it's
conseption) and it is most commonly accepted amoungst programming
languages to use . as the operator for membership. everyone's pretty
scared about taking the . operator (concatonation that is) away since perl
is so commonly used to deal with strings.
> If that's true, my current opinion is that I think "->" and "." make sense
> in their current forms. (e.g. The arrow points to what you want to do to
> $obj and connecting (concatenating) two or more stings is like a game of
> connecting the dot(s) "This " . "$foo " . "is not " "$bar\n")
well maybe you're just caught up in the current way it's done. have you
tried to get used to the new way? damian said that current thought leans
towards ^ as the concatonation operator but this is only a lean and not a
strong one at that. if i had my way, it'd be the 'cat' operator. think
about it. we have = but for strings eq. < but for strings lt. > is gt. why
not make + cat? people think it'd be too much typing.
print "Hello" cat punc("comma") cat "World" cat punc("bang");
> Anyone know more about this? Is he hoping to make perl look more
> javascript-ish or something?
it's not just javascript. it's most languages. i hope larry is not
borrowing anything from javascript.
>
> Also, I think I recall there being mention of being able to precompile your
> code using Perl itself (no need for Perl2exe or ActiveState's PerlApp) in
> Perl6, is that true?
>
> -m-
>
