Re: Expunge use English from Perl? (was Re: Perl6Storm: Intent to RFC #0101)
On Thu, Sep 28, 2000 at 10:00:49AM -0400, Andy Dougherty wrote: On Wed, 27 Sep 2000, Nathan Wiger wrote: Y'know, I couldn't have said this better myself. :-) I've always felt that "use English" was a waste of time and effort, a bandaid trying to act as a tourniquet. I think it's a nice little bit of optional sugar and I don't see any reason to throw it away. The key point is that it's optional. If you think it's a waste of time and effort, don't use it. If other people use it, well... does Perl stop people programming in ways you don't like? -- It is better to wear chains than to believe you are free, and weight yourself down with invisible chains.
Re: Expunge use English from Perl? (was Re: Perl6Storm: Intent to RFC #0101)
Andy Dougherty [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I find that I don't remember many of the less-frequently-used perlvars (where less-frequently-used depends on the types of programs I write, obviously). I certainly couldn't tell you off-hand the differences among $ $ $( and $). I'd have to look them up. I never understood why these were variables. You don't change UIDs or GIDs that often, and when you do you tend to want precise control and because they're variables, they have weird interaction semantics and you have to assign to them in just the right order to get done what you want to get done. See recent threads on comp.lang.perl.moderated. I'd honestly rather see getuid, geteuid, getgid, getegid, and getgroups, along with some consistent and complete subset of the setting functions (with portability magic behind the scenes), in a separate module that only those programs that need to do UID fiddling need to load. I guess the exception is getpwuid($), which is probably done more than any other operation on UIDs, but maybe just keep that single variable. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/
Re: Expunge use English from Perl? (was Re: Perl6Storm: Intent to RFC #0101)
Simon Cozens wrote: On Thu, Sep 28, 2000 at 10:00:49AM -0400, Andy Dougherty wrote: On Wed, 27 Sep 2000, Nathan Wiger wrote: Y'know, I couldn't have said this better myself. :-) I've always felt that "use English" was a waste of time and effort, a bandaid trying to act as a tourniquet. I think it's a nice little bit of optional sugar and I don't see any reason to throw it away. The key point is that it's optional. If you think it's a waste of time and effort, don't use it. If other people use it, well... does Perl stop people programming in ways you don't like? I agree with you. That's why I'd never RFC that we should lose it.* I was just voicing my opinion that I personally think it's a waste. But that doesn't mean others don't like it. ;-) -Nate * assuming it doesn't harm the language, which it doesn't currently
Expunge use English from Perl? (was Re: Perl6Storm: Intent to RFC #0101)
Russ Allbery wrote: I've found the use of use English in code I had to maintain to be annoying and unhelpful, and to actually degrade the maintainability of the code [snip] I've yet to understand why I'd *want* to use English regularly; so far as I can tell, it has essentially no benefit in the long term. [snip] I know it's not the only stance to take, but I prefer to try to make my Perl code very readable by people who know Perl, and encourage people who don't know Perl who are trying to read my code to learn Perl first, or at the same time. [snip] use English doesn't really address the syntactical points of Perl that make it hard to read for someone who doesn't know Perl; it strikes me, and always has struck me, as a bad partial solution to a problem that may not need to be solved and that only makes things more complicated in the long run. Y'know, I couldn't have said this better myself. :-) I've always felt that "use English" was a waste of time and effort, a bandaid trying to act as a tourniquet. Using Randal's code: /foo/ print while ; Note that "use English" here does nothing to improve the horribly unreadable - yet beautifully succinct and flexible - syntax that is Perl. My personal feeling is that I'd love "use English" to be expunged from the language altogether - it's unnecessary bloat that only increases the number of mistakes that people can make. But I'm not sure if I have the guts to write that RFC just yet. ;-) -Nate
Re: Expunge use English from Perl? (was Re: Perl6Storm: Intent to RFC #0101)
On Wed, Sep 27, 2000 at 04:39:32PM -0700, Nathan Wiger wrote: My personal feeling is that I'd love "use English" to be expunged from the language altogether - it's unnecessary bloat that only increases the number of mistakes that people can make. But I'm not sure if I have the guts to write that RFC just yet. ;-) Are you talking about the overlong variable names? Aliasing -X is being proposed through a 'use english;' mechanism. Z.
Re: Expunge use English from Perl? (was Re: Perl6Storm: Intent to RFC #0101)
Adam Turoff wrote: On Wed, Sep 27, 2000 at 04:39:32PM -0700, Nathan Wiger wrote: My personal feeling is that I'd love "use English" to be expunged from the language altogether - it's unnecessary bloat that only increases the number of mistakes that people can make. But I'm not sure if I have the guts to write that RFC just yet. ;-) Are you talking about the overlong variable names? Aliasing -X is being proposed through a 'use english;' mechanism. It's a good thing we've got Larry Wall to untie the Gordian knot of perl6. One rfc to add more english, one to take it away. -- Robert Mathews Software Engineer Excite@Home
