On Fri, 4 May 2001 18:20:52 -0700 (PDT), Larry Wall wrote:
>: love. I'd expect $FOO.readln (or something less Pascalish) to do an
>: explicit readline to a variable other than $_
>
>It would be $FOO.next, but yes, that's the basic idea. It's possible
>that iterator variables should be more syntactically distinquished than
>that. One could, I suppose, make up something about $<FOO or $<FOO>
>meaning the same thing thing as $FOO.next, for people who are homesick
>for the angles, but I haven't thought that out, and don't even dare to
>mention it here for fear someone will take it as a promise. Er, oops...
Just my thoughts: this is sick.
I am having great difficulties in trying to wrap my mind around
iterators. I expect that I'm far from alone at that.
People are *very much* familiar with reading a line from a file. People
may steer clear from a language because it deeply relies on exotic stuff
like iterators.
So trying to turn "read a line from a file" into a special case for an
iterator, is the wrong way around.
What you could do, is treat an iterator as "something similar to reading
a line from a file". Tied filehandles allow something like it in Perl5.
Doing the reverse is, er, insane.
--
Bart.
