Larry mused:
On the other hand, I'm not all that attached to colon itself.
I *am*!!!
If, as proposed elsewhere, we get rid of the %Foo:: notation in favor of
some Foo<> variant, then trailing :: becomes available (ignoring ??/::
for the moment), and
new Dog:: tail => 'long'
almost makes sense, insofar as it kinda looks like it's marking Dog
as a type name, even though it isn't. But
new Dog:: :tail<long>
doesn't look so good.
Nor do object methods:
wag $dog:: 'tail';
say $fh:: $whatever;
On the other hand, looking at it from the other end, the MMD notation
tiebreaking notation is a little hard to spot, since colon is easy
to miss.
Is it??? I've been writing quite a bit of MMD notation, and I think the colon
is very obvious...and exactly the right visual "weight".
Maybe there's something that shows up better in a signature
that also works as the invocant marker and, by extension, the indirect
object marker. Since it's an ordering kind of thing, you'd kind of
like to work > into it somehow, since the left side is of "greater"
importance than the left. Unfortunately, though, "the good ones are
all taken". Maybe some digraph like
method new ($what*> $:tail) {...}
method new ($what+> $:tail) {...}
method new ($what.> $:tail) {...}
method new ($what|> $:tail) {...}
method new ($what>> $:tail) {...}
giving
new Dog*> :tail<long>
new Dog+> :tail<long>
new Dog.> :tail<long>
new Dog|> :tail<long>
new Dog>> :tail<long>
I guess that last one is eqivalent to:
method new ($what» $:tail) {...}
new Dog» :tail<long>
which I could maybe get used to. It kind of looks like a prompt to me.
Not one of these is anything close to as readable as:
new Dog: :tail<long>
name $dog: 'Rover';
say fh: @whatever
*Please* don't give up on the colon there. It's much more readable. I
especially like it for setting up objects:
$person = Contact.new;
first_name $person: "George";
family_name $person: "Bush";
title $person: "President";
email $person: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]";
spouse $person: search $contacts: "Laura";
The ordinary MMD might look like
multi foo ($a, $b, $c» $d)
And Lisp-like MMD fallback on every argument would look like
multi foo ($a» $b» $c» $d»)
I suppose that particular use of » could be construed as encouraging
people not to do that. :-)
I truly believe that using the French quotes or (shudder!) their Texan
equivalents here would be a dire step backwards. They're already overloaded
for word lists and hyperoperators. I think using them for an invocant marker
as well would simply be too much.
The colon really was (and still is) the right choice here.
Damian
