I finally got round to reading a little about Perl 6 - Gabor's blog post / mailout:
http://szabgab.com/blog/2009/06/1245228625.html One thing that leapt out to me was this bit: --quote-- Instead of the quite ugly $#array notation used in Perl 5 (that returns the highest index in the array) fetching the number of elements of array is done in Perl 6 by the elems() function. Actually I think the object oriented writing is much nicer here: use v6; my @names = <foo bar baz>; say elems @names; # 3 say @names.elems; # 3 --end quote-- "elems" seems a pretty odd choice of word. Does anyone know why any of 'length', 'count' or 'size' wasn't chosen for this? Maybe there's an archived discussion somewhere that explains the rationale? I did find this RFC requesting length( @array ) - http://dev.perl.org/perl6/rfc/212.html Ah... answers own question: http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/design/apo/A02.html Basically, "length" is ambiguous / would require overloading for different arguments, hence "elems" is more specific, explicit and less likely to be misinterpreted. I still think "count" would have been clearer, but hey ho. Alex _______________________________________________ BristolBathPM mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.bristolbath.org/mailman/listinfo/bristolbathpm
