On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 06:52:37AM -0400, Mark J. Reed wrote: : On 6/1/07, Larry Wall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: : >Nope. Hash is mostly about meaning, and very little about implementation. : >Please don't assume that I name things according to Standard Names in : >Computer Science. I name things in English. : : Then why did we need a separate "use English" pragma? :)
We needed "use English" because I was temporarily drawn to the shell side of the Force. I have repented. : Are you the one who originally came up with "hash" for %vars? IIRC, : they were officially called just "associative arrays" through Perl4, : but "hash" was a well-understood community nickname for them for some : time before you canonized it with ref($var) eq 'HASH' in Perl5... Yes, I believe I was the one who decided that associative arrays needed a shorter name, and after a period of discussion on perl5-porters, settled on "hash" as the new technical term in Perl culture. But I'm not sure the mailing list archive goes back far enough to verify the exact sequence of events. Certainly I made the final decision, but it's quite possible someone else suggested it first. But I seem to recall getting extremely tired of typing "associative array" while working on Camel II, and that was likely the instigation. Larry
