[regex] \

Think about adding \ to the replacement part of a s///. As in sed, the means the whole match. Then one can do s/$search/*\*/go in stead of s/($search)/*\1*/go and there needs to be no $1 variable set up. (I assume that using () always makes a $1 available, even if it is not being

Re: Exceptuations

Nigel Hamilton schreef: From the point of view of the operating system a program is a nasty exception to its normal running environment - your whole program is a kind of big exception! As if a real OS really likes to run idle most of the time. ;) Like someone intruding on a conversation

Re: Exceptuations

TSa schreef: Yes, I'm also all for unifying the concepts. But please don't let us call it exception. Exception should be a termination oriented (sub)concept. Some kind of scoped giving up. [...] In lack of a better word I use Event and we get Event::Exception, Event::Control, Event::Warn

Re: [regex] \

Juerd: Ruud H.G. van Tol: s/($search)/*\1*/go \1 in Perl 5 is bad style and emits a warning The point was to give \1 and \, in the replace part, a very limited scope. Maybe even better to limit \1 to the first '(?: ... )' in the search part. s/(?:$search)(?:.\1)+/\1/go xy.xy.xy.xy

Re: Ways to add behavior

Larry Wall: But perhaps it wouldn't be kind. 'caste' wouldn't either. For inspiraton: type sort class variety brand category breed manner style nature form hue caste set background stage setting milieu locale range assortment selection mixture strain suite scenery rank grade division status

Re: Ways to add behavior

Stevan Little: They present an rather interesting view on things, that the definition of the instance creating portion of a class should be seperated from the class or kind portion of the class. Its quality. Its character. Its features. Its face. -- Grtz, Ruud

Re: $_ defaulting for mutating ops

John Williams: ($x *=2) += 1; Or ($x *= 2) ++; Maybe the comma should be taught a new trick: $x *= 2, ++, /= 3; meaning $x = (($x * 2) + 1) / 3; Or RPN-like: $x #= 2* 1+ 3/; -- Grtz, Ruud

syntax-variants, RPN (was: Re: $_ defaulting for mutating ops)

Michele Dondi: Ruud H.G. van Tol: Or RPN-like: $x #= 2* 1+ 3/; Being a big fan of RPN myself (and considering it quite natural), I'd appreciate very much such a feature. I had asked myself about RPN features in P6, albeit in a probably unreasonable fashion: http://www.nntp.perl.org

\x{123a 123b 123c}

Maybe \x{123a 123b 123c} is a nice alternative of \x{123a} \x{123b} \x{123c}. -- Grtz, Ruud

apo5 (was: Re: \x{123a 123b 123c})

Larry Wall: Juerd: Ruud: Maybe \x{123a 123b 123c} is a nice alternative of \x{123a} \x{123b} \x{123c}. Hmm, very cute and friendly! Can we keep it, please? Please? Thanks for the support. We already have, from A5, \x[0a;0d], so you can supposedly say \x[123a;123b;123c]

Re: apo5

Larry Wall: Ruud H.G. van Tol: dev.perl.org one day latency but html-ified svn.perl.org up to the minute but only in pod Thanks, much better. Can't say that I haven't been there before. There is a [[:alpha:][:digit:] and a [[:alpha:][:digit]] on the A5-page. The '^' could be used

Re: apo5

Larry Wall: in one of the updates, it says: +[Update: Actually, that's now written C +alpha+digit , avoiding +the mistaken impression entirely.] In dev's A05.html I only found: [Update: That must now be written +alpha+digit, or it will be mistaken for «alphadigit», which doesn't work

Re: apo5

Patrick R. Michaud: 's/$/foo/' becomes 's/after .*/foo/' g Uh, no, because after is still a zero width assertion. :-) That's why I chose it. It is not at the end-of-string? perl5 -e '$_=abc; s/(?=...)/x/; print' perl5 -e '$_=abc; s/(?!.)/x/; print' 's/!before ./foo/' -- Grtz,

Re: apo5

Patrick R. Michaud: Ruud H.G. van Tol: Patrick R. Michaud: Ruud H.G. van Tol: 's/$/foo/' becomes 's/after .*/foo/' Uh, no, because after is still a zero width assertion. :-) That's why I chose it. It is not at the end-of-string? Because .* matches , /after .*/ would be true at every

Re: apo5

Patrick R. Michaud: Ruud H.G. van Tol: 's/$/foo/' becomes 's/after .*/foo/' Uh, no, because after is still a zero width assertion. :-) That's why I chose it. It is not at the end-of-string? Because .* matches , /after .*/ would be true at every position in the string, including

implied looping (was: Re: type sigils redux, and new unary ^ operator)

Larry Wall: for ^5 { say } # 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 The 'for' can go if a list (and also an array) would imply looping, when it is positioned next to a block: a. say (0..4); b. { say; say } (0..4); c. (0..4) { say; say } d. @{0..4} { say; say } (etc.) b. now produces 2 lines with 01234 (in

Re: implied looping

Ruud H.G. van Tol: b. { say; say } (0..4); b. now produces 2 lines with 01234 (in pugs). With implied looping that would be 10 lines, starting with two 0-lines. Standard: do {say; say} for 0..4 for 0..4 {say; say} Wishful: (0..4) »{say; say} pugs doesn't seem to do the (f,oo,bar

Re: type sigils redux, and new unary ^ operator

Juerd: Doesn't ^5 encourage [EMAIL PROTECTED] too much? Can you explain when that creates a problem? Maybe someone doing for ([EMAIL PROTECTED])-$i { say @foo[$i] } in stead of say for @foo After all, we should write what we mean, instead of something that happens to evaluate to the

[OT] (was: Re: implied looping)

Larry Wall: I can see the mathematical appeal of coming up with a language in which there is a meaning for every possible combination of tokens. Yes, that sounds like my language. I agree it's not Perl. And not a lot of other things too.g It's a counterintuitive fact that languages that

Re: type sigils redux, and new unary ^ operator

Juerd: Ruud H.G. van Tol: Doesn't ^5 encourage [EMAIL PROTECTED] too much? Can you explain when that creates a problem? It's not about problems in execution, That answers when not. :) it's about expression. Also if [EMAIL PROTECTED] is the multi-dimensional index zip? Maybe someone

Re: type sigils redux, and new unary ^ operator

Juerd: Larry Wall: [Peter Scott]: It seems strange to have a shortcut for 0..$n-1 but no shortcut for 0..$n. But then you'd usually want 1..$n instead... I think this illustrates very well that it's a bit silly to have a shortcut for just one of the three much-used ranges. But is it

Re: type sigils redux, and new unary ^ operator

Juerd: I have no objections to [EMAIL PROTECTED] returning a list of indexes, if that is the definition. It is what Mark suggested. Rob suggested to use .indices instead. Looking at 'elem(ent)s' and 'ind(exe)s' and 'ind(ice)s', I toss up 'inds' or 'ixs'. I do object to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

directional ranges (was: Re: type sigils redux, and new unary ^ operator)

TSa: HaloO, Hi! Ruud H.G. van Tol: Yes, it could use a step: ^42.7 = (0, 7, 14, 21, 28, 35) ^42.-7 = (35, 28, 21, 14, 7, 0) OK, fine if the step sign indicates reversal after creation. That is, the modulus is 7 in both cases. ^-42.7 = (-35, -28, -21, -14, -7, 0) ^-42.-7 = (0

Re: directional ranges

TSa: Ruud H.G. van Tol: Not at all: they just overlap at 0. OK, to me this spoils regularity. Like 'ab ' ~ ' xy' becoming 'ab xy' is at least surprising, if not outright wrong. That is (~$x).chars + (~$y).chars == +((~$x) ~ (~$y)) should always hold. Same thing for list

Re: Flunking tests and failing code

Nathan Gray: Luke Palmer: I wonder if there is a macroey thing that we can do here. That is, could we make: ok(1); is(1, 1); like(foo, /foo/); Into: ok(1); ok(1 == 1); ok(foo ~~ /foo/); And lexically analyze the argument to ok() to find out how to

Re: Perl grammar for Perl5 - Perl6

Peter Schwenn schreef: Is there such a Perl5-Perl6 translator underway? http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ Perl6 FAQ -- Grtz, Ruud

Re: relational data models and Perl 6

Darren Duncan schreef: If you take ... +-+-+ |a|x| |a|y| |a|z| |b|x| |c|y| +-+-+ ... and divide it by ... +-+ |x| |z| +-+ ... the result is ... +-+ |a| +-+ I'm not sure if Divide has an equivalent in SQL. A verbose way to do it: SELECT

Re: Transliteration preferring longest match

John Macdonald: [trans] If a shorter rule is allowed to match first, then the longer rule can be removed from the match set, at least for constant string matches. It is not about the length of the rules, but about the length of the matches. If both \s+ and \h+ match the same length, should

Re: Transliteration preferring longest match

Larry Wall: Ruud H.G. van Tol: John Macdonald: [trans] If a shorter rule is allowed to match first, then the longer rule can be removed from the match set, at least for constant string matches. It is not about the length of the rules, but about the length of the matches. They're

Re: handling undef better

Darren Duncan schreef: A variable whose value is undefined is still a typed container; eg: my Int $z; # undef since not assigned to my Str $y; # undef since not assigned to If 'undef' becomes 'fail' at the same time that those base types don't have default start-values such as 0 and ''

Re: handling undef better

Gordon Henriksen schreef: I find it useful to distinguish between unassigned and undefined (null). I am not sure that you need this distinction, but it should be no problem to have it, just like 'tainted' and 'NaN' and 'zero/empty' and 'error'. I find null propagation frustrating; it's more

Re: Problem with dwimmery

Jonathan Lang: could we huffman-code do nothing clauses by leaving out the appropriate argument? while $x-- some_condition($x); Heheh, I often code like that, and then silence the complaint by adding the {}. -- Grtz, Ruud

pi/atan/atan2 (was: Re: s29 diffs)

Larry Wall schreef: +=item pi + + constant Num Num::pi = atan(1,1) * 4; + constant Int Int::pi = 3; [...] =item IStandard Trig Functions [...] + multi Num::func ( Num $x: :$base = 'radians' -- Num ) + multi Math::Trig::func ( Num $x = $+_, :$base = 'radians' -- Num )

Re: Perl 6 design wiki?

Juerd schreef: hierarchical names make less and less sense by the day I don't oversee the field yet, but maybe: Introduce aliases (or hardlinks, in file-system-speak). Likely in a separate top branch, such as @alias::. The @alias-prefix is only necessary when there is a collision.

Re: Perl 6 design wiki?

Mark Overmeer schreef: Ruud H.G. van Tol: [aliases next to hierarchical names] @alias::HTTPD::Session - Apache::Session HTTPD::Session - Apache::Session Well, that's a technical solutions... your fill the name-space even more: I can see no harm in that. the larger the harder to grasp

Re: Perl 6 design wiki?

Ruud H.G. van Tol schreef: [Perl6-modules meta-structure] I am currently building a photo classification system. Each photo is more or less unique, it has a unique identification code, and a short and a long description. Both descriptions may even be left empty. The classification

comment scope

Perl6 could introduce (lexical, nestable) comment scope. Has that been discussed before? Maybe like: ##EOC # a comment line # another comment line code #EOC Or like: #{# # first comment line # next comment line code # last comment line #}# Or POD-ish.

Re: comment scope

David Green wrote: Ruud H.G. van Tol: Perl6 could introduce (lexical, nestable) comment scope. Has that been discussed before? I think someone might have mentioned it once. Officially you can use # or make arbitrary POD sections. I don't think that covers what I mean. It was thinking about

Re: [svn:perl6-synopsis] r8520 - doc/trunk/design/syn

Uri Guttman wrote: When cast into an array, you can access all the positional arguments; Into a hash, all named arguments; Into a scalar, the invocant; Into code, into slurpy nameless block. The last 'into' should be 'the'. s/Into/into/g -- Affijn, Ruud

Re: [svn:perl6-synopsis] r8573 - doc/trunk/design/syn

Juerd schreef: autrijus: -foo.($arg1, $arg2); +foo. ($arg1, $arg2); [...] Please reconsider. Yes, please come up with a different character to bridge/cross/hide/cloak/skip/zap the succeeding not allowed whitespace. Maybe the \, making \whitespace mean s:s/\s+//. -- Groet,

Re: [svn:perl6-synopsis] r8609 - doc/trunk/design/syn

Larry Wall schreef: before anyone else points it out to me hihi I think the long-dot rule is built into the parser rather than falling out of the longest-token rule. I think so too, but why then cling to the dot? s:p5/[\][#][^\]*[#][\]// (does not match \#\ ) The backslash is

Re: [svn:perl6-synopsis] r8891 - doc/trunk/design/syn

[EMAIL PROTECTED] schreef: @@ -266,7 +266,7 @@ =item * -The new C:rw modifier causes this rule to claim the current +The new C:rw modifier causes this regex to claim the current string for modification rather than assuming copy-on-write semantics. There are about eight uses of rather

Re: [S05] /ee

Juerd schreef: Dr.Ruud: S05: s/pattern/{ eval doit() }/ s/eval/try/ ? No, string eval stays eval. Only block eval is renamed to try. Understood, but I was thinking about variants like { eval '' ~ doit() } { eval $\doit } and then wasn't sure anymore whether eval doit() is a string

Re: normalized hash-keys

TSa schreef: Dr.Ruud: What would be the way to define-or-set that a specific hash has non-case-sensitive keys? There are two things in this: (1) The syntax to type the keys of a hash---too bad that I forgot it and currently don't find it in the Synopsyses. Pointers welcome! (2)

Re: A rule by any other name...

Allison Randal schreef: Damian: Match is a better word for what comes back from a regex match (what we currently refer to as a Capture, which is okay too). I agree there. I still prefer 'rule'. Maybe matex (mat-ex) for matching expression and, within that, capex/captex (cap-ex/capt-ex) for

Re: A rule by any other name...

Damian Conway schreef: grammar Perl6 is skip(/[ws+ | \# brackets | \# \N]+/) { ... } I think that first + is superfluous. Doubly so if ws already stands for the run of all consecutive word-separators. -- Groet, Ruud

Re: A rule by any other name...

[EMAIL PROTECTED] schreef: James Mastros: Can I suggest we keep match meaning thing you get when you run a thingy against a string, and make matcher be the thingy that gets run? Speaking of the word match, what I'd really like is to keep it meaning stuff that matches. Unfortunately it

Re: A rule by any other name...

Audrey Tang wrote: Patrick R. Michaud wrote: - sp is a single character of obligatory whitespace Hmm, it's literal ' ' (that is, \x20), not whitespace in general, right? For obligatory whitespace we have \s. Are all or some of the following equivalent to sp? U+00A0 No-Break Space

Re: [svn:perl6-synopsis] r9202 - doc/trunk/design/syn

[EMAIL PROTECTED] schreef: Unary C~ now imposes a string (CStr) context on its argument, and C+ imposes a numeric (CNum) context (as opposed to being a no-op in Perl 5). Shouldn't unary minus be mentioned too? Or would one need C0- or C-+? A reduction operator really is a list

Re: [svn:perl6-synopsis] r9197 - doc/trunk/design/syn

Allison Randal schreef: larry: Changed :words/:w to :sigspace/:s and invented ss/// and ms// (or maybe mm//). I keep expecting 'sigspace' to have something to do signatures. /me3, since it alliterates with sigsep. -- Groet, Ruud

Re: perl.perl6.users on nntp.perl.org (was: Logic Programming for Perl6)

mAsterdam schreef: Ovid: Larry pointed out that this topic is better suited for perl6-language instead of perl6-users, so I'm forwarding this along. Is there a reason perl6-users isn't fed through to nntp.perl.org ? Maybe it is but I don't know to which group?

Re: Concurrency: hypothetical variables and atomic blocks

Darren Duncan schreef: Each time a context (a code block, either a routine or a syntactic construct like 'try' is) is entered that is marked 'is atomic', a new transaction begins, which as a whole can later be committed or rolled back; it implicitly commits if that context is exited normally,

Re: Perl5 - Perl 6 Translations Design Document

Sage La Torra schreef: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~slatorra/conversionstageone.txt Any advice/comments/criticism on the document and even ideas on implementation would be greatly appreciated. I think that split('\s+') - split(/\s+/) should be split('\s+') - .split(/\s+/) -- Groet,

Re: CORRECTION: optimizing with === immutable comparitor

Darren Duncan schreef: What I propose concerning non-premature === optimizing is a system where, at any time that two appearances of the same immutable value are compared with ===, they are immediately consolidated into a single appearance. That should only be done voluntarily. A bit like

Re: S04 - forbidden coding-style

Larry Wall schreef: Maybe we should just make statement modifiers uppercase and burn out everyone's eye sockets. :) Or maybe { }. while $x ; -- Groet, Ruud

Re: S04 - forbidden coding-style

Thomas Wittek schreef: Actually I don't know all of them but most seem to be (part of) identifiers, not operators. Of course they are reserved words. What I wanted to say is that it would annoy me, if almost all operators and control-flow keywords are lowercase but a hand full of them has

Re: Implicit current-index variable, scoped inside for-loops

Carl Mäsak wrote: But maybe a variable that implicitly carries along the loop index would be even snazzier? for @array - $val { say $.\t$val; } Or give the block a name (label), and have an index (or several indexes, like some that are reset by redo an some that are not) available,

Re: multi method dispatching of optional arguments (further refined)

Ph. Marek schreef: [Haskell] SomeThing a b | a = 4 : b+2 | b = 3 : a+1 | otherwise : a*b In Perl5 this looks like sub SomeThing { my($a, $b)[EMAIL PROTECTED]; return b+2 if ($a == 4); return a+1 if ($b == 3); return a*b; } Or like: sub SomeThing { alias my

Re: class interface of roles

Larry Wall schreef: I suspect ordered composition is going to be rare enough that we can simply dehuffmanize it to $x does A; $x does B; $x does C; Maybe use a list-like notation? $x does (A, B, C,) ; $x does (A ; B ; C) ; $x does [A, B, C,] ; $x does [A ; B ; C] ;

Re: set operations for roles

TSa schreef: A(|)B produces a subtype of A and B, and that A()B produces a supertype Are you sure? I see as limiting; sub and | as enlarging; super. To me, is connected to multiplication (and inproduct, statistics, fuzzy logic), and | to addition (and outproduct). $ perl -we 'printf

Re: set operations for roles

Jonathan Lang schreef: () and (|) would actually reflect your intuition regarding the capabilities of the result, in that a role arrived at by means of () would provide fewer options than the individual roles used to create it, while a role arrived at by means of (|) would provide more

Re: Set-returning .keys

Darren Duncan schreef: TSa: And I still think that it is a good idea to name the set operations after their equivalent boolean connectives: (|) union () intersection (^) symmetric difference Well, and to make them Bag operations to start with. To start off with, I agree with

Re: supertyping

TSa schreef: Smylers: Jonathan Lang: For the record, I think that superdoes should be spelled done_by. I think it's unlikely that Larry will incorporate any keywords that contain underscores -- certainly not without at least searching for a single word that sums up the concept in

Re: supertyping

Jonathan Lang schreef: what we need here is something that very clearly says the reverse form of 'does': if A does B, then B ___ A. Far more important that if it's one word or two is: what fits most naturally in the gap? follows, trails, tracks, enforces, obeys, tolerates, enacts, endorses,

Re: Smooth or Chunky?

Larry Wall schreef: the point is *not* to force it one way or the other--the point is that many such functions would probably prefer not to commit one way or the other, and they can't do that if they automatically throw away the dimensional information. Like with numbers, this looks to me

Re: propose renaming Hash to Dict

John Macdonald schreef: hash browned potatos which is a hash of chopped potato, onion, and sometimetimes other things fried brown. That comes from the French haché, meaning chopped. Best with lots of small pieces of beef in it as well. -- Groet, Ruud

Re: POD - Code entanglement

Mark Overmeer schreef: The nicest thing would be that the semantic docs become part of the parse tree, which then (using standard introspection) can be used to generate manual pages, natively into POD, roff, HTML, whatever. I like to call them: lexical comments. -- Groet, Ruud

Re: Sequential bias in S04 (and Perl6 in general)

Joe Gottman schreef: if code that should be processed concurrently is instead processed sequentially, the results will be correct Not if parallel sampling of happening stuffs is involved. All of your thousands of temperature sensors in your nuclear factory, all running the same code, should

Re: [svn:perl6-synopsis] r14549 - doc/trunk/design/syn

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: +0 .. ^10 # 0 .. (0..9) + +(It's not yet clear what the second one should mean, but whether it +succeeds or fails, it won't do what you want.) Ah, bob! (bottles of beer) say, say - for ^0 .. ^5; 0 - 0 1 - 0 1 2 - 0 1 2 3 - 0 1 2 3 4 - ;) -- Affijn, Ruud

Re: Temporal and purity

David Green wrote: I don't like dates just starting at midnight because I've run into too many awkward cases where $time $date doesn't do what you mean because it assumes 0:00:00 when you meant 23:59:59. I'd rather have dates becomes time-ranges. And not all midnights exist, because time

Re: Temporal changes

Martin D Kealey wrote: Ah, we want a noun that isn't readily confused as an adjective. Suitable terms might include: Instant Jiffy Juncture Moment Occasion Snap Tick ... Once :) -- Ruud

Re: min= (from Rakudo Built-ins Can Now Be Written In Perl 6)

David Green wrote: my $foo is limited(100..200); $foo = 5; # really does $foo = 100 Where does that MySQ smell come from? Why not undef (or NaN)? -- Ruud

Re: r25614 - docs/Perl6/Spec/S32-setting-library

pugs-comm...@feather.perl6.nl wrote: Author: wayland Date: 2009-02-27 10:19:30 +0100 (Fri, 27 Feb 2009) New Revision: 25614 Modified: docs/Perl6/Spec/S32-setting-library/Str.pod Log: Return type for subst Modified: docs/Perl6/Spec/S32-setting-library/Str.pod

Re: Logo considerations

Larry Wall wrote: And in fact, the ö form looks more like a Hyper Attack Butterfly that is about to bite your face off... :) Her topmodel looks very hexagonal. |_| / \ -/ \- | | -\ /- \-/ | | -- Ruud

decision operator

I wonder if there is place for a decision operator. (search terms: FPGA, evolvable hardware, Xilinx, PLB, LUT, NESW) dop:| 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F + 0 0 | 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 | 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 | 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0

Re: Synopsis 02: Range objects [recap]

Timothy S. Nelson wrote: I think a Complex range only makes sense if you provide 4 endpoints, not 2, but I haven't been following the conversation, so I'll leave it up to the Complex number experts :). (start-angle, start-length) :by(angle-step, length-factor) -- Ruud

Re: S26 - The Next Generation

Jon Lang wrote: An unrelated possibility would be to allow empty A tags in a declarator block, with 'A' being replaced with the name of the declarator to which the block is attached: And then I think: A_ -- Ruud (indoctrinated)

Re: numerics, roles, and naming

Darren Duncan wrote: For the integer version, my understanding is that number theory already provides a suitable term, Gaussian integer, which is a complex number whose real and imaginary parts are both integers. So I suggest using Gaussian as the name option for an IntComplex. Or maybe

Re: Ideas for a Object-Belongs-to-Thread threading model

Jason Switzer wrote: On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 3:59 AM, nigelsande...@btconnect.com wrote: And at the core of that, is the need for preemptive (kernel) threading and shared memory. These can (and should!) be hidden from the application programmer, through the use of language and/or library

Re: Suggested magic for a .. b

Aaron Sherman wrote: Having established this range for each correspondingly indexed letter, the range for multi-character strings is defined by a left-significant counting sequence. For example: Ab .. Be defines the ranges: A B and b c d e This results in a counting sequence (with the most

Re: Return value of try

On 2010-11-15 23:46, Aaron Sherman wrote: try { ?$!PIO.close() } $! ?? fail($!) !! Bool::True Probably try{} can be made to return a True when there was no exception? try { ... 1; } or fail( ... ); try { ...

Re: Encapsulating the contents of container types

On 2011-08-18 16:06, Carl Mäsak wrote: I was working on the Little Animal Farm game yesterday, and wanted to make it totally safe against tampering from the outside. (See http://masak.org/carl/yapc-eu-2011-little-animal-farm/talk.pdf.) I ended up implementing a custom accessor method and a sub

Re: Naming debate- what's the location for it?

Don't type here. On 2018-02-10 05:16, Parrot Raiser wrote: On 2/10/18, Darren Duncan wrote: I think if we want to keep "Perl" in the name we should use "C" as a precedent. Other related languages keeping "C" include "Objective C", "C#", "C++", Perl++ would work.

Re: Checking for nil return

Basically, never mix error-state and return-value. Rather use a different channel/dimension for each. And any value itself can have special state too, like "absence" and (via its type) "has-default". On that docs-page, my stomach protested against the Nil/default pairing. Now I need to