I'm all for not having any variety of log() in the default namespace. Regardless, mathematical functions should follow mathematical norms. Changing Perl tradition is one thing, but we have centuries, sometimes millennia, of tradition to deal with in the mathematical realm. It should not be violated lightly.
On 7/10/09, Austin Hastings <austin_hasti...@yahoo.com> wrote: > 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 > -- Sent from my mobile device Mark J. Reed <markjr...@gmail.com>
