On Wed, Aug 16, 2000 at 10:24:09AM -0400, Karl Glazebrook wrote:
> It was the response which was blithe, it just re-iterated arguments we
> are all completely familar with and did not address my point in the RFC.
Then perhaps we need to agree to disagree. I feel that a number of
people have addressed your points.
> and this is supposed to be good?
>
> presumably snrub() has a first line like my($apples, $oranges, $price)=@_
> and it would be far clearer to call it that way.
What makes you presume this? Perhaps snrub() is something like this:
sub snrub {
foreach (@_) {
frobnicate $_;
}
}
You appear to arguing that expressions in function argument lists should
not be evaluated in a list context. Is this really what you mean?
> > Perhaps we should remove context? Sure, you won't be able to test
> > for @a == 5 any more, but we can just rewrite that as $a->length == 5.
> > At this point, there isn't much need for the $, though, so we
> > can just say a->length == 5. That -> is ugly, though; maybe we can
> > turn it into a . like the rest of the world, at which point we're
> > every bit as good as Python!
>
> Python is really nice and we should endeavour to learn why a lot of people
> like it so much rather than telling them 'good riddance'.
Certainly, we should steal whatever nice features it has that Perl lacks.
Perl should never try to BE Python, though; the world already has Python.
We don't need another Python, we need a better Perl.
One of the fundamental concepts in Perl is context. Would you care to
address the point of what happens to context when you remove @ and %
prefixes?
- Damien
