David Green wrote:
It occurs to me that "log" is a pretty short name for a function I
rarely use. (In fact, I'm not sure I've ever used it in perl.) On
the other hand, I -- and a thousand or so CPAN modules -- are always
logging stuff in that other popular computer sense. (All right, that
number isn't exactly the result of a rigourous study... I did find 57
modules that mentioned logarithms.)
The inertia of tradition weighs heavily here, but perhaps we could
call it ln(). (If anyone asks, I'm prepared to say with a straight
face that it stands for "log (numeric)".) And/or log(), but with the
:base arg mandatory -- then as long as your status logging doesn't
have a :base, you can have both.
Umm. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, P6 has redefined the
syntax of regular expressions, converted bitwise negation into a
stringification unary and a binary catenation operator, and torqued a
bunch of other keywords and line noise^W^Woperator characters out of shape.
Do we really give a rat's posterior about the historical legacy of a
mathematical function that (statistically) never gets called?
Like everything else mathematical, jam it into a Math:: class and clean
up the default namespace. (FWIW: My perl scripts don't do logs, in
EITHER sense of the word. I don't want to replace one bit of namespace
clutter with another one. All you web guys can use the Apache::log
method, or whatever.)
=Austin
