On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Graham Barr wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 23, 2001 at 05:19:22PM -0700, Larry Wall wrote:
>
> > At the moment I'm leaning toward ^ for concat, and ~ for xor. That
>
> I think that would lead to confusion too. In many languages ^ is
> xor and ~ is a bitwise invert. It is that way in perl now too, so
> perl is already quite standard in that area. Changing these just
> to get . for -> so that we are more "standard" seems very strange
> as you are loosing two standards to gain one.
>
> To be honest though I don't think it is possible to get a single
> char concat operator with loosing something else, which is a shame.
> It would be good if we could somehow overload + to be both string
> and numeric, but I not sure that is possible.
I think someone may have mentioned this already, but why not just say
that if you want '.' to mean concatenation, you have to surround it on
either side with white space? If there's no white space around it, then
it is forced to mean method invokation, or whatever else. Sure, some
japhs will break, but that's just too bad :-) Perl already
has other cases where white space matters, why not one more. That way,
perhaps we can all get what we want, namely that '.' means both
concatenation _and_ method invokation.
John.
