Hi, This is already handled in Perl 5 - which I guess will have an influence on Perl 6. I doubt Larry is going to force everyone to quote the hash subscripts (are you Larry? :)
Let a newish (6 < now < 12 months) non professional (unemployed student ;) Perl programmer, like myself, look at how he'd expect things to be handled - and what actually happens. Hence, I'm going through this twice... once BEFORE testing my expectations in Perl, and once AFTER. > $foo{shift} vs. $foo{"shift"} Hmm... I think 'shift' would be taken as the key, not the function in both cases. ANS: I was correct > $foo{bar} vs. sub bar() { ... } $foo{bar} As previous. > vs. $foo{+bar} I think the + would cause it to fail... since it looks a little like it is part of a sum. ANS: The + forces it to an EXPR, meaning that bar is treated as a function call. However - this action still makes sense to me, since + is used to force scalar context in some places. > vs. $foo{bar()} Now, this would call bar(). ANS: I was correct. > vs. $foo{"+bar"} Easy, it's a key. > vs. $foo{"bar()"} Easy, it's a key. > and they never cause any problems? Not usually :) The rules actually do what I (think) I mean, in almost all cases. Only perlTk causes any problems since the named arguments are prefixed with minus symbols. In this instance they need quoting. Jonathan Paton __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com