----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Matthew Brooks" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Boston Perl Mongers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2001 3:25 AM
Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] Breaking "." to ruin "->" in Perl6?!
>
>
> On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, Matthew Brooks wrote:
>
> > I haven't had the chance to attend any of the Perl6 discussions yet. So
I've
> > been following it from a distance... a looooonnnnnnnggggg distance ;)
>
> that's funny i can read this just fine. how far away could you be?
Only about a month or two behind current happenings... but I'm catching up
;)
>
> > >From what I can tell (correct me if I'm wrong... PLEASE!) Larry is
actually
> > considering (or should I say, has already decided) to change
$obj->method()
> > to $obj.method() in Perl6.
>
> that's right it looks like -> is dead. i can only speculate but i think he
> is turned off by the -> operator because it is a hack from c/c++ that was
> used to overcome presidence of the . versus the * operator. if you don't
> know c/c++ e.g.:
> *foo.x /*is not going to work*/
> (*foo).x /*is cumbersome but is what you mean*/
> foo->x /*is a hack to solve this*/
>
> we don't have this problem in perl though so maybe that's not why he
> doesn't like it. admitedly it is a silly operator (especially given it's
> conseption) and it is most commonly accepted amoungst programming
> languages to use . as the operator for membership. everyone's pretty
> scared about taking the . operator (concatonation that is) away since perl
> is so commonly used to deal with strings.
>
> > If that's true, my current opinion is that I think "->" and "." make
sense
> > in their current forms. (e.g. The arrow points to what you want to do to
> > $obj and connecting (concatenating) two or more stings is like a game of
> > connecting the dot(s) "This " . "$foo " . "is not " "$bar\n")
>
> well maybe you're just caught up in the current way it's done. have you
> tried to get used to the new way? damian said that current thought leans
> towards ^ as the concatonation operator but this is only a lean and not a
> strong one at that. if i had my way, it'd be the 'cat' operator. think
> about it. we have = but for strings eq. < but for strings lt. > is gt. why
> not make + cat? people think it'd be too much typing.
> print "Hello" cat punc("comma") cat "World" cat punc("bang");
>
Hopefully I'm not giving the impression that I'm resisting change, because
that's not the case. I'll welcome anything that has sound at least some
semblance of reason behind it (even if I don't agree with it). I just don't
think "I don't like it" or "Every other language does it this way" is good
motivation, especially if something has to get broken in the process.
I guess overall, I'm really more concerned with the breaking of "." than the
disappearence of "->". Sure, I guess we could have a "cat" operator, or a
funky combination like >< or >-< (Larry can even dub the latter two the
bow-tie ;) ), but "." is simple and something everyone's fingers already
know how to get to by heart so anything that replaces it should be probably
just as simple. Especially since many concatonated strings have multiple
"cat"-calls (sorry, couldn't resist)
"^" is a bit of a stretch, but at least it is a single character
"~." I saw this one somewhere... hated it<-(Watch a rerun of In Living Color
with the "Men on Film" skit for appropriate accent and finger-snap)
">-<" although a bowtie operator would be cute in name, it's not really fun
to type over an over.
"><" a shorter bowtie might have more promise and with little practice you
can do it on one stroke.
But how about just ":"? Anyone have any thoughts or know if Larry and the
crew have considered it?
-matthew-
> > Anyone know more about this? Is he hoping to make perl look more
> > javascript-ish or something?
>
> it's not just javascript. it's most languages. i hope larry is not
> borrowing anything from javascript.
>
>
> >
> > Also, I think I recall there being mention of being able to precompile
your
> > code using Perl itself (no need for Perl2exe or ActiveState's PerlApp)
in
> > Perl6, is that true?
> >
> > -matthew-
> >
>
>
