On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 09:23:19PM -0000, Smylers wrote: > Michael Lazzaro wrote: > > > Here's my own argument for using "like/unlike", and "none", and a > > bunch of other english-sounding things we haven't even talked about > > yet. > > > > ... I don't think we've put much of a dent in the "readability" > > complaints ... I think we need to care about these concerns a _lot_ > > ... > > I agree that this is an important concern which should be addressed. > > > My own solution would be, in part, that we offer english-word aliases > > like "like", etc., even if they're only meant as training-wheel > > versions of the more linenoisy things, wherever we can. So people can > > be trained on the words, and graduate to the "professional" constructs > > as they become more comfortable. > > However I believe that having English aliases would make matters worse.
I agree, in general. I was planning on writing something about this. Now I don't have to :-) The only thing I would add, is that this is an experiment that has already been tried. Perl 5 has English.pm. Is is used? Not much. Who uses it? Mostly people writing their first programs. Why is this? Well, I suspect that people read though perlvar and notice the references to English.pm and think that if is comes with the core they should probably be using it. After a while they realise that most people don't use it so they still have to learn the punctuation, and anyway they still have to search perlvar every time they need to know what they should check after calling system(), so what's the point? How many people can even remember the English for $_? Or how to spell "The string following whatever was matched by the last successful pattern match"? Anyway, you can draw your own conclusions from the experiment. -- Paul Johnson - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pjcj.net
