From: "Larry Wall" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2001 1:10 PM
Subject: Re: Tying & Overloading
> Helgason writes:
> : I _really_ think dot-syntax would make perl prettier as well as make it
> : more acceptable to the world of javacsharpbasic droids. Which is some
> : kind of goal, no?
> Consider it a given that we'll be using . for dereferencing. (Possibly
> with -> as a synonym, just for Dan. :-)
>
> Larry
I hate yelling without good reason, but this /is/ good reason. CAN SOMBODY
PLEASE TELL ME A _GOOD_ REASON TO SWITCH TO . FOR METHOD CALLS?
Reasons I have seen are:
1) Two less keys to press.
2) Looks cleaner.
3) Looks more like other languages.
Counterarguments:
1) Produces confusion for perl5 programmers.
I think that we should be kinder to perl5 programmers switching to perl6
then to java[script]/vb programmers switching to perl6. (C and C++
shouldn't be an issue; we stole -> from C in the first place.)
I submit that := is far uglyer and harder to type then ->.
I don't think that we should change around huge amounts of other things just
so we can s/->/./.
If we really want an easyer-to-type method call operator, I'd go with \.
It's use currently outside of a qq is erronious. It can't interoperlate
inside of qq, but nor can any other operator discussed here.
It doesn't look much like whitespace (if that's what you mean by "looks
nice"). If you want that, you could go with `, which could produce some
ambiguity, both with qx and with ', which looks very similar in many fonts.
BTW, I think that considering no-whitespace cases of indirect object is
quite silly -- does anybody acatualy use that?
This is the first I thought it wasn't a syntax error.
-=- James Mastros
