On Wed, Sep 27, 2000 at 05:11:30PM -0700, Nathan Wiger wrote:
> Yes, but perhaps a little bit of both. Truthfully, I've always seen long
> alternatives as useless bloat, not used widely over the long term. Once
> people learn the shortcuts, they use them.
>
> Expunging "use English" may will improve Perl syntax, since it's one
> less way to do things with already dubious value.
A lot of use English has to do with aliasing global variable linenoise,
which is already going away. For instance, $/ is becoming per-handle,
and $: (?) is probably going away because it has nasty
action-at-a-distance properties, and FORTRAN programmers never use it
to offset the zero-index to one. (Abigail uses it to make japhs that
bizarrely store the number 17.)
It has nothing to do with improving the syntax though, because everything
in use English is a variable that serves as a reference to some other
variable.
> I'm not vehemently opposed to "use English", or even the long
> alternatives to -r and -w that RFC 290 proposes. But I do think,
> truthfully:
>
> 1. They don't solve the real syntactic problems
No, because the syntactic problems are -s(FH)/2, and that is
solved by fsize(FH)/2 iff -s is replaced with fsize (or a better
spelling thereof).
> 2. Very few people will ever use them long-term
I dunno. I remember looking at some code that used '-x _' that
had half a department befuddled. -rwx FH is better, and gets rid
of the special case bare _ syntax.
Z.
