On 6/20/05, BÁRTHÁZI András <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > - in natural languages, synonims are very often - alias is a synonim
Perl is modeled on natural languages, but that doesn't mean it is one. At its core, Perl is a limited, artificial language being explicitly designed with certain goals. One of those goals is that it should be as small as possible given the feature set we want it to support; an `alias` built-in that essentially duplicates an existing feature goes against that goal. > - in Perl 6, currently there's no way to create a reference to a > variable, _with the context of the variable_, too (binding just give > me possibility to bind a variable into another, but the new variable > won't be automatically have the same context, as the binded one) I'm not sure what you mean by "context" here. Context has a very specific meaning in Perl, representing the type a function's caller is expecting; this doesn't seem to be what you're talking about here. > alias kilobytes, kilobyte; This is a couple punctuation symbols short of: &kilobytes := &kilobyte; Or maybe: &kilobytes ::= &kilobyte; I'm not really sure what behavior you have in mind for alias. (By the way, a simple name like "alias" is ambiguous about argument order, where an operator isn't.) -- Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Perl and Parrot hacker