Re: RFC 263 (v1) Add null() keyword and fundamental data type

[Damien Neil]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2000 at 01:21:52PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> No offense to Damian, but I tried to read and understand his documentation
> and I thought I was back in grad school.  I don't think it's the fault of
> the writing either; I think that Quantum::Superpositions is trying to do
> something that's rather too complicated to explain clearly to the average
> programmer.
> 
> It's a neat idea, but I don't expect to see it ever widely used.

I disagree.  I think that, ignoring the documentation, the operations
performed by Quantum::Superpositions are intuitive and elegant.

  print "$a is between 1 and 10" if ($a == any(1 .. 10));

The above is simple and clear.  The any() and all() operations are,
perhaps, surprising to experienced programmers (we aren't used to
languages that provide them), but will be instantly understood by
most novices.

If I could be assured that the performance penalty was minimal, I'd
be delighted to write

  if ($errno == any(EAGAIN EINTR)) { ... }

over

  if ($errno == EAGAIN || $errno == EINTR) { ... }

The former is less typing and reads more clearly (to me, at least).


I am of two minds about the documentation.  On one hand, it's
highly theoretical bent will be intimidating to many.  On the other
hand, I found that it clearly described what was going on, and
nicely explained the complexities underlying the simple interface.

I do wonder whether there isn't a better name for eigenstate().

                      - Damien