Old stuff becomes relevant again...
-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Larry Wall)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Larry Wall), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Perl 5 Porters)
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 1997 16:32:29 -0700
Message-Id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
: According to Larry Wall:
: > Also, you can put your beloved article in:
: > sub foo is a locked method returning list { }
:
: I hope you're not serious, Larry.
I'm serious about thinking through all the possibilities before we
settle on anything. All things have the advantages of their
disadvantages, and vice versa.
Part of language design is purturbing the proposed feature in various
directions to see how it might generalize in the future. Sometimes we
choose the generalization. Sometimes we don't.
I'm just pointing out here that treating subroutine attributes as a
list of little pragmas that can be ignored if not understood has some
interesting benefits for people who like to be verbose. It also has
some marginal benefits in terms of backward compatibility. I wouldn't
ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.
: Perl may permit poetry, which is
: fine by me, but this is going out of your way to accept the syntax of
: full English sentences, and that's beyond the pale. Besides, why
: should a reader expect that a declarative description of &foo would be
: followed by the body of &foo?
It's appositival, if it's there. And it doesn't have to be there.
And it's really obvious that it's there when it's there.
: > I'm inclined to stick with the more adjectival
: >
: > my obedient persistent frozen mongrel Dog $fido = new DOG;
: >
:
: I don't mind adjectives. But full declarative sentences.... *shudder*
Oh, get ahold of yourself. Nobody's proposing that we parse English.
As with all the other proposals, it's basically just a list of words.
You can deal with that... :-)
We can certainly outlaw any words that don't correspond to something
like a package name, or whatever.
And I still think "is" is prettier than ":", if we want a mandatory
delimiter. But I'm sure I can think up lots of arguments for ":" too.
I hope I'm not getting so famous that I can't think out load anymore.
Larry
----- End forwarded message -----
--
"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be, and
if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!"
-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"
