On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 07:54:09PM -0700, Luke Palmer wrote:
: Larry Wall writes:
: > On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 11:56:26AM -0700, John Williams wrote:
: > : On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Larry Wall wrote:
: > : > You subscript hashes with {...} historically, or these days, «...»,
: > : > when you want constant subscripts. So what you're looking for is
: > : > something like:
: > : >
: > : > if / <?foo> ... <?baz> ... { $?foo{'baz'} ... $?baz } .../
: > : > or
: > : > if / <?foo> ... <?baz> ... { $?foo«baz» ... $?baz } .../
: > :
: > : I'm probably a bit behind on current thinking, but did %hash{bareword}
: > : lose the ability to assume the bareword is a constant string?
: >
: > It's thinking hard about doing that. :-)
: >
: > : And why «»? Last I heard that was the unicode version of qw(), which
: > : returns an array. Using an array constructor as a hash subscriptor is
: > : not a "least surprise" to me.
: >
: > We'd be trading that surprise for the surprise that %hash{shift} doesn't
: > call C<shift>.
:
: And how often is that, compared with the frequency of doing
: %hash{optname}, %hash{root}, etc? %hash{~shift} isn't so bad, and it's
: one of those quirks that people will just have to learn. Perl has
: plenty of those, and people don't mind once they know them. I'm
: grateful for most of them, now that I'm more experienced.
Yeah, and guess who had to trust his gut-level feelings for that? :-)
: It's one of those things you'll have to mention when you talk about hash
: subscripting, that's all. After all, why isn't a hash subscripted with
: []? And why isn't the inside of a subscript a closure? These are as
: "inconsistent" as quoting a single {word}.
Well, all context dependencies are created equal, but some are more
equal than others...
: > Plus we get literal hash slices out of it for free. Plus it also
: > works on pair syntax :foo«some literal words». And probably trait and
: > property syntax as well.
: >
: > And basically because I decided :foo('bar') is too ugly for something
: > that will get used as often as switches are on the unix command line.
: > The %hash syntax is just a fallout of trying to be consistent with
: > the pair notation. Once people start seeing :foo«bar» all over,
: > they won't find %hash«bar» surprising at all, and will appreciate the
: > self-documenting literalness of argument.
:
: Except the six extra keystrokes involved in typing them. Yeah, I know,
: I could reduce that, but Perl's already used up the rest of the
: keyboard! :-)
It's really the visual disambiguation that convinces me. It's extra
keystrokes for me too, y'know, and my finger joints complain to me
every day. I mostly just ignore 'em, but they do make a fearful
crackling most of the time... But my eyes are bad too, so I have
to cater to them too...
But really, it's my brain that's my weakest organ, and I can't fix that,
so I figure I'll just have to feature it.
Larry
