Paul Johnson wrote: > On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 09:23:19PM -0000, Smylers wrote: > > > I believe that having English aliases would make matters worse. > > I agree, in general. I was planning on writing something about this. > Now I don't have to :-)
Pleased to be of help! > The only thing I would add, is that this is an experiment that has > already been tried. Perl 5 has English.pm. > > Is is used? Not much. > > Who uses it? Mostly people writing their first programs. Good point. > How many people can even remember the English for $_? Or how to spell > "The string following whatever was matched by the last successful > pattern match"? There is one situation where I use it. That's for C<$UID> and friends. I have never bothered to learn which brackets are which in those four variables, and I need them so infrequently that I think the English names make the code considerably more readable. But this is a particular situation where the Perl names are referring directly to pre-existing real-world concepts that already have specific names. Keeping those names makes sense (when compared with seemingly arbitrary punctuation[*0]). It doesn't follow that it makes sense to try to fit names on to concepts that don't have them. C<$_> is just 'the current thing I'm dealing with right now', and C<~~> could be 'the appropriate kind of match' without having to find single-word English labels. *0 Yes, I'm aware of the mnemonics in perlvar, but I can't recall them fast enough when browsing through code. Smylers
