At 1:54 AM +0200 6/19/05, Juerd wrote:
Except for attributes, which play a different game: the colon comes
*instead* of the dot as the twigil, while the accessor method gets : in
front of its name. If I recall correctly, the syntax is very misleading
in that it is NOT part of the name.
I would argue that the same rule applies to attributes and methods
alike; privates of both have ':' as part of their name, and *every*
attribute or method reference, public or private, has a '.'. No
"instead" here.
So if you just factor out the ':' as being part of a private thing's
name, then all other discussions for syntax can treat public and
private the same way.
This goes for both explicit invocant forms like $obj.attr or
$obj.meth and implicit forms like $.attr or $.meth, where in all
cases 'attr' or 'meth' may or may not contain a leading ':', but it
doesn't matter for the main discussion, except that ':' can't be used
in the trailing edge of the operator.
Its much more consistent that way.
$.bar $.:bar # I wouldn't mind if $:bar were an *abbreviation*
I agree and would accept $:bar *if* it were officially an
abbreviation, as you suggest, just like one can omit the '.' on
things like $foo.[0].{'bar'}; however, the full/longer form should
always be valid syntax.
-- Darren Duncan
