On 5/14/07, Thomas Wittek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Moritz Lenz schrieb:
>> What makes Perl hard to read is the excessive use of special characters
>> (/\W/).
>
> I disagree: The make it look ugly, but not hard to read.
Even if it's "only" ugly: To what advantage? I don't think ugliness is a
good characteristic of a programming language.
Some people consider mathematics ugly too, but expressivity for
mathematicians is valued more over general readability. So too in perl.
(This is related to "learn once, use often")
Additionally I'm not a friend of sigils:
>
> Then you shouldn't program in perl. Really.
Reason? I still haven't seen a good justification for sigils.
Whether you like it or not, sigils are a part of Perl's personality that
aren't going away any time soon. If you don't like them, then you shouldn't
use perl. All those people claiming that Perl 6 isn't Perl would be on the
money if Perl 6 didn't have sigils.
To allow arrays and scalars and subs to have the same name (besides the
sigil) although they have different content? No good idea I think.
I also can't remember that I ever named a variable like a "reserved
word" or operator. And even if I could, I'd consider it to be bad style.
I think of it more like hungarian notation. The sigils enable a default set
of expectations. "Oh, I see an @, so this thing must be an array". Perl 6
has changed the meaning behind the notation ever so slightly, but the
utility is still there.
-Scott
--
Jonathan Scott Duff
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
