Larry Wall wrote: > On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, Ken Fox wrote: > : Ok, thanks. (The "followed by a colon" is just to explain the behavior, > : right? It's illegal to follow a code block with a colon, isn't it?) > > I don't see why it should be illegal--it could be useful if the closure > has played continuation games of some sort to get backtracking.
Apoc 5 has "It is an error to use : on any atom that does no backtracking." Code blocks don't backtrack (at least that's what I understood Damian to say). Are zero width atoms treated specially? And can you give me an example of a continuation game? That sounds sort of like my original question. Great news about backtracking into sub-rules. Perl 6 is going to be a lovely system to work with. I think it's going to suffer a bit from the same declarative-face vs procedural-heart** that Prolog does, but it hits the "little language" target perfectly. - Ken ** Prolog uses a cut (!) operator to control backtracking just like Perl 6. A big problem (at least for me...) is learning when ! just makes things run faster vs. when ! gives me the wrong answer. Maybe I just haven't used Prolog enough to get my brain wrapped around it.
