Piers Cawley writes:
> > > The $a and $b of the sort comparator were A Bad Idea to begin with.
> >
> > Ditto. Can we ditch these in Perl 6? Don't see why $_[0] and $_[1] can't
> > be used, or even a more standard $1 and $2. Either one makes it more
> > obvious what's being operated on.
>
> $1 & $2 could be somewhat dangerous in a sub that might have regexen
> in it...
$1 and $2 are a poor choice because of regexps.
$a and $b were done for speed: quicker to set up those global
variables than to pass values through the stack. The documentation
for perl5's sort function says that passing as arguments is
considerably slower. I don't think you can handwave and say "oh,
that's an implementation detail". I think it's an implementation
detail that's bloody hard to fix, especially for things like code
references passed to sort:
sort $some_ref @unordered
Perl can't do anything at compile-time to tell sort where lexicals
in the sort sub are.
So I don't have a solution, I just have more detail on the problem.
Nat
