Dan Kogai wrote: > We already have source filters in perl5 and I'm pretty much sure > someone will just invent yet another 'use operators => "ascii";' kind > of stuff in perl6.
I think that's backwards to have operators being funny characters by default but requiring explicit declaration to use well-known Ascii characters. Doing it t'other way round would mean that you can always write fully portable code fragments in pure Ascii, something that'd be helpful on mailing lists and the like. There could be an alias syntax for people in an environment where they'd prefer to have a non-Ascii character in place of a conglomerate of Ascii symbols, maybe: treat '»...«' as '[>...<]'; That has the documentational advantage that any non-Ascii character used in code must be declared earlier in that file. And even if the non-Ascii character gets warped in the post and displays oddly for you, you can still see what the author intended it to do. This has the risk that Damian described of everybody defining their own operators, but I think that's unlikely. There's likely to be a convention used by many people, at least those who operate in a given character set. This way also permits those who live in a Latin 2 (or whatever) world to have their own convention using characters that make sense to them. Smylers
