> Funny you should mention that. This brings up something that I was
> afraid to mention before, lest it be regarded as too weird. There isn't
> any strong syntactic reason for subs to be delimited with just braces either.[*]
> Sure, there's a historical Perl precedent, and I'd probably be forced to
> put the C<sub> keyword in there, but imagine a Perl that could handle
> this:
>
> sub foo «
> mumble
> »
>
> I'm imagining a table something like this:
>
> Subroutine Pattern matching
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Default { code } / pattern /
> delimiter
>
> Declare named sub foo <delim> rule foo <delim>
> code pattern
> <delim> <delim>
>
> Declare named sub foo (args) <delim> rule foo (args) <delim>
> with args code pattern
> <delim> <delim>
>
> Create $ref = sub <delim> $ref = rule <delim>
> anonymous code pattern
> <delim> <delim>
>
> Create $ref = sub (args) <delim> $ref = rule (args) <delim>
> anonymous with code pattern
> args <delim> <delim>
>
>
> (By "default delimiter" I mean the delimiter that allows you to create
> an anonymous thingy without using "sub" or "rule".)
You're right, it is very weird. But to be honest, there's something
downright appealing about it. For what it's proposing, it gives a strange
sense of consistency and unification.
I suppose it would be trivial to modify the grammar to do this. If it
were included in the language (yeah, right), it would probably be best not
to tell newcomers about it. It would scare a lot of the hardcore
other-language programmers off for sure.
Of course, it's vastly diverging from Larry's "{} means a closure." It's
not breaking the rule, it's just going far, far away from it.
In general, I doubt this will make it past the "that would be cool" stage,
that is until we find out how to rewrite the grammar :).
Luke
