On 2004-04-16 at 00:25:51, Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon wrote: > Number of keystrokes isn't our only concern here. This is Perl, not > APL--we care about the size of the language and its intuitiveness too. > (Perhaps not much, but we do.)
In any case, Perl is far more typable than APL unless you have an APL keyboard *and* lots of experience using it. There's more to typability than number of keystrokes. :) > It's also worth noting that, except for Javascript, every language I can > think of uses paired characters for indexing. JavaScript does, too. foo.bar is a special case only usable for literal keys that fit the lexical category of word; the usual subscript operator is [] (foo.bar is equivalent to foo['bar']). > Visual Basic (ugh) uses (). Hey, don't blame Visual Basic for that. It inherited it from non-visual BASIC, which in turn inherited it from FORTRAN, which was designed to run on systems with 6-bit character sets that had no other brackets. :) > I'm not arguing that your syntax isn't shorter or easier to type. I'm > arguing that shorter and easier to type aren't enough to justify it. Agreed. > To make my position clear: WE DO NOT NEED THREE WAYS TO INDEX A HASH. > I don't really think we need two. All we really need is one way with a > good enough syntax to meet all of our needs. Amen. -Mark
