On Mon, Apr 23, 2001 at 11:31:18AM -0700, Larry Wall wrote:
> There are many people who would prefer . to ->, if for no other reason
> than it's cleaner looking and is one less character to type. The fact
> that it's become the industry standard for method call syntax is also
> a point in its favor.
>
> Incidentally, Perl 6 will not require . everywhere that Perl 5 requires
> ->. The deref will be assumed before (), [], and {} (where an operator
> is expected). We're only talking about method calls here, really.
Something in my gut feels wrong about needing to relearn all my operators
to use Perl 6. When I write Perl, . MEANS concatination to me. It's
spread through all my code. I know that Perl 6 is going to evolve...but
this is attacking something fundamental to the way I perceive the language.
Change what ., ~, and ^ mean in Perl 6, and I'll need to keep two
operator maps in my head whenever I look at Perl code. "OK, this is
some old Perl 5, so ~$foo is a bitwise negat...oh, wait, it's really
new Perl 6, and this is a concatination..."
I'm a neophile, and I'd balk at switching to a Perl 6 that did that.
I know my coworkers would revolt; they're already dubious about Perl's
level of complexity.
I'd really rather just make method calls with ->.
If you're dead-set on reassigning ., please consider leaving it at
that, rather than juggling all the other operators around. Make
concatination be "$a cat $b". ("eq" and friends already provide
precedent for string operators being words rather than symbols.)
- Damien
