Re: RFC 84 (v1) Replace => (stringifying comma) with =>

[John Porter]

Nathan Torkington wrote:
> 
> Perl makes easy things easy.  Hashes are bloody useful, as the last
> decade of Perl has borne out.  They deserve syntactic support because
> they're used a lot and are worthy of a shorthand.

        my @aa :assoc;

        $aa['foo'] = 'bar';

Is no one getting my point?

The ability of arrays to be indexed by strings, or by any other arbitrary
data type/structure, and, more importantly, for the indexing algo to
be based on a hashing function, or anything else, should be user-
selectable, with certain schemes predefined for your convenience -- the
current hash implementation being the obvious example of that.

I suppose this has more to the with the "Improve Tie" subject, but
what I'm arguing for here is syntactic transparency between regular
arrays and any other kind of arrays (including associative arrays).

Since the range of available syntactic cues -- [] vs {} -- is so limited,
it would be better to have just one, and let the user bind the indexing
scheme to the variable.

-- 
John Porter