Russ Allbery wrote:
> I have a very serious problem with use English, namely that it makes Perl
> code much more difficult to read and maintain for people who know Perl
... and don't know use English. Why can't they learn to use it? Are
you saying that nothing is worth knowing unless the oldsters know it
already?
It's not that I want to jam English down everyone's throats. But Nate
asked, "does anyone want this," and I said, "yes." Or at least, I would
want it if it worked.
> I know what $/ does; I double-take at $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR and am never
> sure whether it's a user's personal global variable or $/ or some other
> thing. And $ARG and $MATCH both really look like global variables to me
> and I'd hunt through the program trying to find where they're defined
> for a while before realizing they're weird use English things.
You'd learn to recognize the long variable names if you used English
regularly. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, but not a very difficult
one.
--
Robert Mathews
Software Engineer
Excite@Home
