Larry Wall wrote:
The Turing programming language uses splat to stand in for the length of the array, so in Turing *a[*-1]* means what Perl 5 programmers mean when they say *$a[-1]*.Somebody needs to talk me out of using A..Z for the simple cases.
Larry
However, splat is already quite heavily loaded in Perl 6. So I got to thinking of Ada's "empty box" operator, *<>*. Maybe it would be a good stand-in for the temporary "it" that represents a dimension's length. So [EMAIL PROTECTED]<>-3..<>-1]* could be the syntax to grab the last 3 three elements of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
That might confuse users of languages that were not C-syntax-influenced, who think that '*<>*' means "not equal". But surely old Modula hacks like me are in a minority in the Perl world (and Pascal programmers would never do Perl, would they? Algol, anybody?) So maybe I'm the only one who runs the risk of that particular confusion. :-)
'Course, I don't pretend to understand all the possible existing meanings that '*<*' and '*>*' already have in Perl 6, either.
=thom Q. How many Malkieri does it take to screw in a light bulb? A. Well, it better not be more than one.
