Re: A..Z alternatives
Andrew Rodland [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
What about BASIC? Aren't all the little kids today raised on BASIC? :)
I don't know about the kids _today_, but for about twenty years
starting circa 1980 most home computers came with exactly one
programming language tool, and it was BASIC -- line-number BASIC
initially and QBasic later. A lot of the programmers who cut their
teeth on BASIC never made the transition to C, because C as a language
is so primitive compared to BASIC (not in terms of absolute
capabilities or performance but in terms of the amount of abstraction
provided) that it felt like stone knives and bearskins. Perl came
along and is actually even more high-level than BASIC, and a number of
us picked it up and never looked back.
aside--
(As for me, in between BASIC and Perl I also picked up Inform and
Emacs Lisp, which are also much higher-level languages than C. I
tried on two separate occasions to make myself learn C (plus two
_additional_ attempts at C++) before I finally realized I don't
actually *want* to maintain legacy code written in a low-level
language, anyway. I also tried Python and PHP, but they didn't
take because I kept thinking how much easier things are in Perl.)
--backtotopic
So yeah, there are a lot of BASIC-influenced people writing Perl code.
However, I don't think using for something other than not-equal is
going to be a big deal. Perl5 doesn't use for not-equal either,
and picking up a differently-named operator or two is *NOT* the hard
part of learning a different programming language. It's the paradigm
differences that will get you, and Perl6 is going to stand in good
stead there because it supports most of the paradigms out there to one
degree or another.
--
$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b-()}}
split//,[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ --;$\=$ ;- ();print$/
Re: A..Z alternatives
Andrew Rodland wrote: On Tuesday 21 September 2004 07:18 pm, Thomas A. Boyer wrote: Larry Wall wrote: Somebody needs to talk me out of using A..Z for the simple cases. Larry [ for array dimension placeholder ] That might confuse users of languages that were not C-syntax-influenced, who think that '**' means not equal. But surely old Modula hacks like me are in a minority in the Perl world (and Pascal programmers would never do Perl, would they? Algol, anybody?) So maybe I'm the only one who runs the risk of that particular confusion. :-) What about BASIC? Aren't all the little kids today raised on BASIC? :) Only if their parents are evil... I was raised on BASIC and look what happened - now I'm writing Perl Quiz of the Week solutions in Haskell!
A..Z alternatives
Larry Wall wrote: Somebody needs to talk me out of using A..Z for the simple cases. Larry The Turing programming language uses splat to stand in for the length of the array, so in Turing *a[*-1]* means what Perl 5 programmers mean when they say *$a[-1]*. However, splat is already quite heavily loaded in Perl 6. So I got to thinking of Ada's empty box operator, **. Maybe it would be a good stand-in for the temporary it that represents a dimension's length. So [EMAIL PROTECTED]-3..-1]* could be the syntax to grab the last 3 three elements of [EMAIL PROTECTED] That might confuse users of languages that were not C-syntax-influenced, who think that '**' means not equal. But surely old Modula hacks like me are in a minority in the Perl world (and Pascal programmers would never do Perl, would they? Algol, anybody?) So maybe I'm the only one who runs the risk of that particular confusion. :-) 'Course, I don't pretend to understand all the possible existing meanings that '**' and '**' already have in Perl 6, either. =thom Q. How many Malkieri does it take to screw in a light bulb? A. Well, it better not be more than one.
Re: A..Z alternatives
On Tuesday 21 September 2004 07:18 pm, Thomas A. Boyer wrote: Larry Wall wrote: Somebody needs to talk me out of using A..Z for the simple cases. Larry [ for array dimension placeholder ] That might confuse users of languages that were not C-syntax-influenced, who think that '**' means not equal. But surely old Modula hacks like me are in a minority in the Perl world (and Pascal programmers would never do Perl, would they? Algol, anybody?) So maybe I'm the only one who runs the risk of that particular confusion. :-) What about BASIC? Aren't all the little kids today raised on BASIC? :) --Andrew
