--- Deborah Ariel Pickett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Getting off topic here (a bit), but I think it's a Mistake to have > .length mean different things on an array ["Number of elements"] and > a (string) scalar ["number of characters"].
> While there will never be any confusion on the part of Perl, > it'll promote Thinking About Things The Wrong Way among Perl > novices, who will try to think of strings as C-like arrays of > characters. We've gone to great lengths to disabuse people > of that notion in Perl5; let's keep it that way. > Perhaps .size for number-of-elements and .length for length-of-string > would work? <sarcasm> This would just cause them to Think About Things A Different But Equally Wrong Way: as assembly language objects whose SIZE in bytes is the determining component of their existence. </sarcasm> Seriously, if they're smart enough to run a text editor, I think it's safe to say that they can handle the conceptual difference between the "length" (mins:secs) of a video, and the "length" (feet:inches) of the mag-tape that encodes the video. People deal with different inherent units all the time in the real world -- some of them even remember to carry the units through their equations when they're doing math. Let's give some credit to the audience at large. =Austin
