On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 02:21:52PM +0100, Stéphane Payrard wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 09:49:38AM +0100, Kay Roepke wrote:
> >
> > On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 04:29 AM, Adam Turoff wrote:
> >
> > >I've never come across a programmer who wishes he could do this
> > >in C and have the compiler magically know what's what:
> > >
> > > int spam (int spam, char **spam) {
> > > int eggs;
> > > double spam;
> > > return 0;
> > > }
> >
> > It's very obvious that the C programmer can't distinguish between spam
> > and spam (no pun intended :-)).
> > That's the whole point of sigils!
> >
> > Well, in Perl you don't use it like that, anyway. If you mean the
> > scalar variant (portion)
> > if data you write $data. If you mean the array you write @data. (Note
> > that in Perl6 the notion
> > of using the $ sigil when accessing the elements (as in $data[0]) is
> > gone.)
> >
> > IMHO the visuals are pretty clear and state the type of a variable not
> > only at place it's been declared, but
> > rather all over the program. I really like that reminder when reviewing
> > code (esp. when it's +10_000 lines ;-))
>
>
> Yes. The existence of sigil is a feature that gets even more consistent
> with Perl6. It does not goes overboard like the naming Microsoft
> convention that use type to suffix name variables:
> http://www.shadowmud.org/Documents/Naming.htm (I forgot the name of
> the guy who pionnereed it) but it does not precludes it either.
>
> Sigils follow the convention that important things should come first.
> They say me what I can do with the "sigiled" variables. It is also a
> form of HuffMan coding, type indication happenning often (because of
> the deliberate choice of indicating at each reference and not only at
> declaration), it had to be short.
>
> But should be allowed to declare in the same scope @a, %a and $a?
>
> Definitively yes because it permits to use the same sigless name for
> related variables:
>
> In Perl5:
>
> # it is very natural for me that iterator has the
> # same siless name than the object iterated upon.
> for my $a (@a) {
> ...
> }
>
>
> # here %a, and @a have also a close relationship.
> my (%a, @a);
> $a{$_++} for @a;
>
> The major gripe I have with Perl6 is that space is not used as syntax
> when meaningful and not as mere token separator, generally
> optionnal;
I meant:
The major gripe I have with Perl6 is that space is not used as syntax
when it could be meaningful. It is only a mere token separator, generally
optional.
> I will restrain here myself to talk about it in the restricted context
> of the (overuse) of sigils.
>
> In font design, non alphabetic characters are not intended to be
> concatenated with other characters like alphabetic characters are to
> make a natural visual flow. BTW: Serifs are designed to help this flow but
> it works only on high-resolution devices.
>
> Non alphabetic characters are very conspicuous, so redundancy should
> be avoided. But Sigil _and_square/curly bracket are redundant.
> Space as syntax can be a device to drop the sigil when dereferncing an
> array or a hash.
>
> a [$a] # call the function a with a reference to an array as parameter
> a[$a] # dereference the array @a
>
> Same thing goes for C<a {$a}> and C<a{$a}>.
>
> Certainly, within double quotes one has to write C<@a[$a]> because
> without the sigil, that would be to easy to accidentally dereference
> an array. This is a case of preferring convenience over
> consistency. Probably for the consistency freaks C<a[$a]> should be
> allowed as well as C<@a[$a]> outside double quoting context.
>
>
> --
> stef
> >
> >
> > Kay
> >
