On 2009-May-29, at 7:53 pm, Darren Duncan wrote:
Thirdly, there are I'm sure a number of other aliases that could be
added to other ops, such as ≤ and ≥ for <= and >=, and ≠ for
one of the inequality operators, although that last one would
probably make more sense if = was the equality test operator, so
maybe best to avoid ≠ then.
Probably. I would really like to see the "obvious" symbols defined,
though, for two reasons:
1) Being able to use real symbols (e.g. ≤ instead of crude ASCII
approximations) will make Perl code look ever so pretty and make all
the other kids envious. (Envy is, of course, one the great
programmers' virtues, the one that makes us steal all the best bits
from other languages!)
2) It will discourage people from abusing operators that already have
well-defined standard meanings. For example, if there is no ∑,
somebody might be tempted to use it for multiplication; or to use √
for checking something; or + for concatenating strings, etc.
However, I think some set ops could also be used with hashes. For
example, an alternate way of spelling "exists %foo{$bar}" is "$bar
∈ %foo" or "%foo ∋ $bar".
I think that one's ambiguous as to whether $bar exists as a key or a
value.
$bar ∈ @foo; $bar ∈ %foo.keys; $bar ∈ %foo.values; ∃ %foo{bar}
-David
