On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Moritz Lenz <mor...@faui2k3.org> wrote:
> But there's a good reason: .method is a term on its own, and actually > means $_.method. So if you write @names.foo .bar, that's two terms in a > row. > That is indeed a good reason. I think I knew about it but forgot. That now the $_ variable is a little less magical and a little more predictable. Instead of writing just "print" you write ".print" which makes it clear that print is acting on $_. You could argue that that's always a syntax error, and we could > special-case it after a method, but I think it's a bad idea. Firstly > it's an exception that makes it harder to learn the language, and > secondly disallowing two terms in a row is what enables predictive > parsing, and is very important for getting sensible syntax error messages. > I'm not a big fan of special cases. As you said, they make the language harder to learn. I would add that it makes it harder to predict what a piece of code is going to do. One thing I want from a programing language is to predict what it's going to do. Cheers, Daniel. -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email, but a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
