On Tue, Aug 15, 2000 at 05:45:04PM -0400, Karl Glazebrook wrote:
> I hope people will actually read the RFC before coming back with these
> canned responses which I (and presumably everyone else on this list)
> am completely familiar with. I used to believe that too! Honest...
I think you do a significant disservice to brush off criticism so
blithely. Complaining that anyone who disagrees with you has not read
the RFC is unlikely to garner much support.
Line noise or not, I like the type prefixes.
I like being able to treat arrays and hashes differently from other
things.
snrub($a);
snrub(@a);
snrub(%a);
snrub(@$a)
snrub(%$a)
Each one of these does something different. I know, just by looking
at the expression, with absolutely no further knowledge of what the
function and variable involved are, the general nature of what is
going on. I know whether the function is receiving one argument or
several. I can make reasonable assumptions about what will happen
to the contents of the variable. I know something about what
operations I can perform on the variable.
If your proposal goes through, how will I perform these operations?
What will "snrub(@a)" become? If we just turn all the @%s into $s,
then it becomes "snrub($a)" -- and now snrub is being passed a
variable number of arguments, and I have no way to tell this without
more context. Maybe we can keep the @{} syntax -- but now you need
to say @$a where you before said @a, and the line noise has increased,
not decreased.
The real problem in the above is context -- when I see @a or %a, I
know that it will behave in one fashion in list context, and another
in scalar context. $a, on the other hand, may be trusted to remain
the same no matter what the context. Indeed, I'd say that all the
line-noise puncuation is one of the things that makes context
bearable.
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!
Y'know, I like Python. Lot of nice things in that language. Maybe
we should all jump over to their mailing lists rather than wasting
our time with Perl 6.
- Damien
