At 11:49 AM 6/18/2002 -0700, Larry Wall wrote:
>On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Melvin Smith wrote:
>: 2) In fact, there are MANY funny named macros in Perl5.
>
>That is precisely *why* they had to have funny names. Perl 5's
>macro naming schemes were a vast improvement over Perl 4's. In
>Perl 4 it was impossible to tell at a glance what kind of macro
>you were looking at.
>
>: Don't you agree that code should document itself as much as possible?
>
>Sure, but there's more than one kind of self-documentation.
>The self-documenting nature of Perl 5's macros is intended for people
>who can see patterns, not for people who have to have it all spelled
>out to them every time. After all, when Perl 5's code was originally
>written, it only had to be readable by one person, which was me. :-)
However, there is a happy medium, right, and everyone has a different
idea of happiness.
>: #define BOop(f) return ao((yylval.ival=f, REPORT("bitorop",f) PL_expect =
>: XTERM,PL_bufptr = s,(int)BITOROP))
>: #define BAop(f) return ao((yylval.ival=f, REPORT("bitandop",f) PL_expect =
>: XTERM,PL_bufptr = s,(int)BITANDOP))
>
>Doesn't matter how often it's used--it fit into the system. I don't see this
>as a good place for Huffman coding. In particular, macros defined in
My point wasn't whether it fit into the system, I wouldn't want
to write the above inline (no macro), but we differ in opinion on
what a good name is, maybe. I also don't prefer the long, hungarian
notation I provided in my example. :(
>the same file they're used are not much of a problem here. If you can't
>remember what they mean, you just search for them. It's the macros that
>are defined in header files that have to be very carefully named.
Why the need to search for something that could be clarified with a few
extra characters?
>As I say, those aren't a very good example, being local macros rather
>than global. It was much more important to systematize the macros in,
>say, pp.h. After all these years, I still know exactly what a
>dPOPTOPnnrl does, and it's not because I remember the name.
So are we saying there is nothing in a name?
-Melvin
PS: I suppose I came off sounding like I was criticizing Perl5 code. I wasn't;
since I could as easily rip up a piece of my own Parrot code. I was simply
refuting the idea that the reasons people have problems with macros in Perl5
had nothing to do with funny names.
