On Wed, 2009-01-21 at 14:23 +0000, Peter Scott wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:35:50 +0100, Carl Mäsak wrote:
> > I'm trying to explain to myself why I don't like this idea at all. I'm
> > only partially successful. Other people seem to have no problem with it,
> > so I might just be wrong, or part of a very small, ignorable minority.
> > :)
>
> I find myself echoing you. I don't have the language design skills others
> are displaying here. I can only evaluate this from an educator's point of
> view and say that the P5 syntax of
>
> is $x, 42, 'Got The Answer';
>
> is just about the conceivable pinnacle of elegance for at least that form
> of question. (Compare, e.g., the logorrhoea of Java tests.) I do not see
> how I could tell a student with a straight face that the P6 proposal is an
> improvement, at which point the conversation would devolve into a
> defensive argument I do not want to have.
>
> I get that 'is' is already taken and we do not want the grammar to engage
> in Clintonesque parsing when it encounters the token. Okay. But how do I
> justify the new syntax to a student? What are they getting that makes up
> for what looks like a fall in readability?
I don't quite understand the problem with using the same syntax as in
Perl 5, just uppercasing the verbs so they won't conflict with everyday
syntactic features:
OK($bool, 'Widget claimed success');
IS($x, 42, 'Widget produced the right answer');
(This is ignoring issues of placement of parens or curlies to make the
Perl 6 syntax attractive and consistent with other constructs -- I'm
just talking about using verb rather than adverb syntax, with our
already properly Huffmanized verb names intact.)
I do like the idea of having TEST {} blocks that go inactive when not in
testing mode (however that is defined). But other than that, I don't
understand the value of the other syntactic changes suggested, the
adverb syntax in particular. Maybe I'm missing something obvious ....
-'f
