Re: Strings vs Numbers (Re: Tying & Overloading)

[Larry Wall]

Bart Lateur writes:
: Yeah. But no cheers then. The problem still remains: you can access a
: hash in the normal way in plain code, but inside a sub, you can mainly
: only access a passed hash through a reference.

Won't be a problem.

: It's annoying to basically having two ways of doing something, and one
: of them can't be used half of the time.
: 
: Even though @foo and %foo may be two different structures, a scalar $foo
: can only reference one of them at a time.
: 
: Are you going to provide a simpler aliasing mechanism to turn a hash
: reference, for example as passed to a sub as an argument, back into the
: full-blown hash? Simpler (and safer) than the much frowned upon
: assignment to a tyeglob, that is.

Yes.  In fact, a %hash prototype will provide a scalar context, forcing
a %foo arg to return a reference, and that ref will be aliased to %hash.
You will be required to do something explicit to declare an argument
that supplies list context and slurps the rest of the args.  (There
will also be an explicit way to slurp a list of items but supply
scalar context.)

Larry