On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 10:08, Erik Steven Harrison wrote: > > -- > > On 17 Nov 2002 11:09:53 -050 > Bryan C. Warnock wrote: > >On Wed, 2002-11-13 at 13:26, Angel Faus wrote: > >> > >> There are many ways to specify literal numeric values in perl, but > >> they default to base 10 for input and output. Once the number has > > > >Surely, Perl 6 will allow changing the radix on a more global scale. > > Of course it will! But just about anything acn be changed with a grammer munge. >Theoretically Perl 5 could add radix notation with a source filter. But we don't have >to document that. > > I think that we should avoid refering to pragmas and modules as much as possible in >the core documentation. That's a departure from Perl 5. Here's my case: >
Is it expected that the base grammar should always be base 10, or that the base grammar should always have a default radix? Given the amount of introspection normally found in perl, I expect the latter, regardless of the implementation - ie, a pragma, or a property, or a magic variable. The point was to *not* state in the documentation that an implicit radix defaults to base 10, but to a default radix (which, by default, happens to be 10). It's not important to document how that default can be changed, but it *is* important to capture the precise semantics of the language-to-be, for both the users and the core coders. -- Bryan C. Warnock bwarnock@(gtemail.net|raba.com)
