"Joseph F. Ryan" wrote: > Perhaps in the grand scheme of things; however, anyone that is > redesigning a system should not be ignorant of how the old system > worked (even in the slightest degree), in order to know of what to > keep and what to throw away.
Oy. One more time. My objection is this: I said C<map {...} @a> and friends are special compared to normal subroutine syntax, because there isn't a comma after the {...}. It was then stated that C<map> itself is not special, because the '&' in the prototype allows the special case to exist not only in "map", but in anything else prototyped in the same way. True. My error, therefore, was to not properly define what I meant by "normal subroutine syntax", because I thought it was clear from the context what "normal" meant... it meant "compared to having a comma there". But it wasn't clear. This, however, is a Computer Science discussion. Computer Science is one of those fields populated almost exclusively by people who consider any statement devoid of at least three explanatory footnotes to be an act of aggression, and who measure their own genius in large part by their practiced lack of ability to infer meaning from any string of words not emanating from their own head. Thus, a possible response like "I don't agree with your use of the word 'special' to describe this case, because these other cases are identically 'special' too" is transformed without any apparent irony to "since you did not use the precise wording I myself would have used in your two-sentence explanation, that provides conclusive evidence that you therefore don't know Perl5." Yes, in hindsight, I should have responded "I know *why* the specialness exists, you thundering blowhards, I'm just noting that it *is* special compared to how *most* subroutine argument lists look. Quit assuming that every last syntactic nuance will tunnel untouched to Perl6 by the grace of your own unassailable wisdom, and tell me *why* this particular one should." [1] Those sorts of communications can sometimes cross the semantic barrier. Yes, perhaps we should all have our mail proofread by a peer jury before we post, thus attempting universal semantic clarity... or perhaps we can all just practice those human social skills that some of us might have seen on television or in the movies, and Get Over Ourselves. [2] (Note that Damian was the *only* person who, at any point in the discussion, was able to identify the notion that not having the comma there was "different" from having the comma there, and was able to respond with an argument more structured than "because Perl5 does it." _This_ is why his ideas get implemented. Duh.) [3] > >Any programmer who doesn't know that they are ignorant are almost > >certainly instead arrogant. > > Ignorant of what? Surely we shouldn't assume that we're all ignorant > of Perl? What I'm trying to avoid is the apparent need for programmers to degrade every conversation into an I'm-smarter-than-you semantic duel. In the entire history of the Perl6 process, there has been noone here to emerge as God's Perfect Gift to Language Design -- I think the design has been improved repeatedly by the collective thoughts of the group. But nobody, individually, has a very good batting average, so I think nobody is in a position to throw stones. MikeL [4] [1] OK, that's definitely not civil. Which is why I didn't originally say it. [2] Er, that's not great either, but probably in the range of acceptable. [3] Note to self -- remove the 'Duh', and it will be fine. [4] And yes, the irony of needing N paragraphs to try to convince programmers of such a profoundly simple concept is not lost on me. Nor is the fact that it will inevitably fail...