On Tue, Jan 23 2007, Larry Wall wrote:

> ... Basically, this is the inverse of [;], which turns LoA into a
> CoC.
>
>     [;] chunky mumble()
>
> But "chunky" is clunky, and I'm wondering what syntactic relief we
> can give ourselves here. ...
>
> (That almost suggests it should be another metaoperator.  Let's all
> shudder together now...but not rule out the possibility.) ...
>
> The possibilities are endless, and I don't doubt that you can think of
> a few more...

To the horror of parsers everywhere, we could make the inverse of [;]
the "outverse" of [;].  What about this?

    ];[ mumble()
    ];[ map { $_, $_ * 10 }, 1..3
    ];[ zip(1,2;3,4)
    
There's already some precedent for bracketing pairs being pointed the
wrong way, as in  (1,1,2,3,5) »+« (1,2,3,5,8).  Also, ];[ kind of
looks like a butterfly, which I count as a point in its favor.

In true metaoperator form, you could presumably throw other operators
between the backwards brackets for other chunky operators.  I haven't
really thought through what I would want multislice addition ( ]+[ )
or multislice equality testing ( ]==[ ) to mean, though.

Thanks,
/au

-- 
Austin Frank
http://aufrank.net
GPG Public Key (D7398C2F): http://aufrank.net/personal.asc

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