Larry Wall skribis 2005-04-22 18:31 (-0700):
> I should point out that we're still contemplating breaking .foo() so it
> no longer means $_.foo(). I wish there were more keys on my keyboard...
Which I think would be a very bad idea, so while I can (as long as no
other decision has been made), I'm using the current syntax :)
I even consider breaking compatibility with bare Perl 6, for my grammar,
if that's necessary to get .foo to use the same implicit LHS as .[5].
Subs and loops are related, and aliasing the invocant as $_ the same way
a loop aliases the loop variable as $_ makes sense to me. when you use a
loop within a sub, do the same thing as when you use a loop within
another loop: explicitly use the full name, or use OUTER::.
> We do, after all, have better ways of declaring private methods and
> functions now. so maybe we don't need to reserve _ for that anymore.
I was planning on using prefixed underscore for macros that slurp up
till the end of a line, so syntax highlighting could be adjusted for
those things that would otherwise break. With non-underscore, I'd have
to use a litter, or make my macro a prefix operator, which is more work.
> And it would save two characters over $_.foo(). But recovering C
> programmers will scream, and probably prefer _.foo(), even if it only
> saves one character.
_ on my keyboards is two keys, shift and -, while . is only one.
In fact, I find $_.foo even easier to type than _.foo, and better
looking. Especially because the $ sigil is part of the name now, _
without sigil should not be used.
> Maybe it's time to raid Latin-1 for the next closest thing to a dot,
> "middle dot":
> �say(...);
> �close or fail;
Please, no.
> But I'm sure some will argue that's too subtle. (Hi, @Larry<Damian>.)
String index for an array?
> say�(...);
> close� or fail;
> Then foo� would be $OUTER::_.foo(), foo� would be $OUTER::OUTER::_.foo().
For that matter, I think repeating prefixed dots works just as well:
.foo # $_.foo
..foo # $OUTER::_.foo # OUTER::$_.foo
...foo # $OUTER::OUTER::_.foo # OUTER::OUTER::$_.foo
This shouldn't clash with yada, I think. (In the case it does (why would
it?), adding parens is an obvious way to break ambiguity: (...).)
> Yes, especially the c: scheme. :-)
I have no pity for Win32 users :)
For all I care, they can use file:///c|/... or the awful MSIE variant
file://c:\foo\bar.
But I guess it's safe to treat single-letter schemes as Win32/DOS
volumes, as there are no single-letter URI schemes.
Juerd
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