Re: use less in perl6?

2005-04-02 Thread Larry Wall
On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 10:20:28AM +0200, Yuval Kogman wrote:
: How should this stuff be expressed? 'use less' is cute, but i don't
: think it really gets there.

It's mostly there as a placeholder for all the "true pragmas" that
can be ignored if you don't understand them, an idea I originally
stole from Ada.  We sort of got away from that notion in Perl 5,
but it'd be nice if we could have some way of recognizing hints that
can be ignored if unrecognized.  That was the original intent of the
uppercase/lowercase distinction in "use", but we lost the distinction
somewhere along the way.  At least we've gotten rid of "use overload".
Maybe we can reclaim the lowercase modules for futureproofed hinting,
or establish some other convention.  I agree that "use less" ain't it.

: Perhaps this interface, or it's principals should also allow
: similarly controlled debugging/tracing. Usually when trying to look
: inside a big app, you are only concerned about a specific part. I
: think this is very analogeous to optimization hints:
: 
:   sometimes you want to override it form the command line
: 
:   sometimes you only want it to apply to calls from a certain
:   place
: 
:   sometimes you want to enable it from within the code it applies
:   to, and sometimes outside of it
: 
:   you often want a volume knob for this behavior
: 
:   you want several instances of usage to not conflict
: 
: I'd like to see what the design team can do about this.

Welcome to the design team.  Have at it.  :-)

This problem seems to be a generalization of the earlier discussion
about turning warnings on or off in lexical vs dynamic scopes.

Larry


Re: use less in perl6?

2005-03-30 Thread Herbert Snorrason
On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 08:56:58 -0500, Matt Fowles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 08:48:55 -0500, Aaron Sherman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > use less syntax;
> Back out the entire p6 grammar and put in lisp's instead...
Huh. I suppose that's the only difference these days... ;)

-- 
Schwäche zeigen heißt verlieren;
härte heißt regieren.
  - "Glas und Tränen", Megaherz


Re: use less in perl6?

2005-03-30 Thread Matt Fowles
Aaaron~


On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 08:48:55 -0500, Aaron Sherman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 10:20 +0200, Yuval Kogman wrote:
> > Perl 6 has some more interesting capabilities for lexical scoped
> > hinting of tradeoff preferences. For example:
> >
> >   use less precision; # the default nums created in this scope are
> >   # lower precision floats
> >
> >   use less cpu; # many places this can have a desired effect
> >   use less memory; # especially in the underlying impls of
> >   # structures
> >
> >   use less stuff; # might have a meaning for a library
> 
> Hmmm.. I wonder what this would do:
> 
> use less syntax;
> 
> ;-)

Back out the entire p6 grammar and put in lisp's instead...

Matt
-- 
"Computer Science is merely the post-Turing Decline of Formal Systems Theory."
-???


Re: use less in perl6?

2005-03-30 Thread Aaron Sherman
On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 10:20 +0200, Yuval Kogman wrote:
> Perl 6 has some more interesting capabilities for lexical scoped
> hinting of tradeoff preferences. For example:
> 
>   use less precision; # the default nums created in this scope are
>   # lower precision floats
> 
>   use less cpu; # many places this can have a desired effect
>   use less memory; # especially in the underlying impls of
>   # structures
> 
>   use less stuff; # might have a meaning for a library

Hmmm.. I wonder what this would do:

use less syntax;

;-)