On Wed, Aug 23, 2000 at 12:17:18AM +0000, David L. Nicol wrote:
> Nathan Torkington wrote:
> > The precedent of "if you're doing a hash
> > lookup, use {} around the key" is fairly well-ingrained in Perl.
>
> I don't care how "ingrained" the concept of wrapping the
> field names in curlies is, I still think it sucks, and so does anyone
> who arrives here after using a language where there is a character (which
> is conventionally dot) between the record name and a field in it.
You don't care how existing Perl programmers, or Perl programmers to-be,
will approach the problem, and what they expect the solution to be?
Stealing features from other languages and adding them to Perl is one thing,
changing existing Perl syntax or expectations is quite another. Granted,
Perl has tried to be nice to programmers coming from other disciplines and
languages, but the existing Perl programmers shouldn't be dismissed simply
to gain new users.
> Dot in the above example code clearly parses into string-cat, and if you
> try hat Damian Conway descends on you like a herd of koalas.
>
> We've run out of symbols on our keyboards, we'll have to start reusing
> some of them.
Or not add enough special-cases to warrant new symbology.
Michael
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