At 05:56 PM 5/10/2001 +0200, Bart Lateur wrote:
>On Fri, 4 May 2001 18:20:52 -0700 (PDT), Larry Wall wrote:
>
> >: love. I'd expect $FOO.readln (or something less Pascalish) to do an
> >: explicit readline to a variable other than $_
> >
> >It would be $FOO.next, but yes, that's the basic idea. It's possible
> >that iterator variables should be more syntactically distinquished than
> >that. One could, I suppose, make up something about $<FOO or $<FOO>
> >meaning the same thing thing as $FOO.next, for people who are homesick
> >for the angles, but I haven't thought that out, and don't even dare to
> >mention it here for fear someone will take it as a promise. Er, oops...
>
>Just my thoughts: this is sick.
Right, but is this a good thing or a bad thing?
>I am having great difficulties in trying to wrap my mind around
>iterators. I expect that I'm far from alone at that.
>
>People are *very much* familiar with reading a line from a file. People
>may steer clear from a language because it deeply relies on exotic stuff
>like iterators.
>
>So trying to turn "read a line from a file" into a special case for an
>iterator, is the wrong way around.
Really? I don't think so. Filehandles really *are* iterators on files.
Granted I'm one of the folks homesick for the angles (I like the visual
distinction and contextual diambiguation (And no, I can't believe I just
typed that...)) but even without them it makes a lot of sense.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
