On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, Larry Wall wrote:
On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 06:43:05PM +0000, Herbert Snorrason wrote: : This whole issue kind of makes me go 'ugh'. One of the things I like : best about Perl is the amazing simplicity of the <> input construct.
Hmm.
while (<>) {...} for .lines {...}
Looks like a wash to me.
Partly it does. The point is that not only the <> is simple, but that it is also visually distinctive, which is important IMHO.
Obviously the new proposal of unary C<=> is just as good from this point of view...
: Replacing that with something that not only is object oriented, but on : top of that also LOOKS object oriented is bound to be a loss. It's : going to be that bit longer to write, and not the least bit easier to : understand.
Really? I dare you to show those two lines to any random computer-literate but non-Perl-speaking stranger and see which one they understand better.
Of course they'd understand better the latter, but I think that there's a limit to non-Perl-speaking-people-friendship. After all this may be useful for learning perl, but learning it to a good degree would always involve getting acquainted with quite a lot of typical idioms, so this does not make much of a point IMHO, provided that when a typical user becomes familiar with those idioms he can perceive (i) how good they look in source code (ii) how useful they result in practice.
It's all cargo cult at that level anyway, so whether it looks OO or not is really completely immaterial to its usability.
Indeed it's not *purely* a matter of "looking OO", but of "looking yet another more-or-less alphabetic string" (yes, even with a prepended point: it's just not as markedly distinctive!). As I said, <> is deeply etched in Perl programmers' cortex as an input operator. In other words it may well be cargo cult, but not in a totally negative acceptation: I mean... till it works, and works well as it currently does!
And I don't buy the nuclear blackmail argument either. I'll start worrying about people switching to Python and Ruby when those languages get a clue about how natural languages work. As far as I know, there's
OTOH, as a side note, but not a totally unrelated one, I guess, one should pay some attention not to exaggerate following natural languages principles in designing programming languages: granted, I appreciate their pervasiveness in (current) perl and indeed probably this is one of the reasons I love it. But I think that there are some natural limits to this as well: AFAIK any attempt to overcome them was basically a failure. We want the *right* mixture of conciseness, intutivity, clarity instead. In this sense a construct like
while (<>) {
...
}really doesn't resamble any natural language construct as far as I can see, but indeed it's an idiom that perl programmers easily become familiar with and like to use... well, I think so!
Michele --
I hold a square measuring 10x10 metres away from a person who is standing 100 metres away. I ask them to shoot the square with a high-accuracy gun.
Don't stand there holding the square when they are shooting... - Robert Israel in sci.math, "Re: Scaling"
