Scott Walters skribis 2004-04-14 13:12 (-0700):
> Second, autovivication is impossible for the same reason. We can't tell
> from parsing this lone expression whether baz should be converted to numbers
> or strings automatically.
I want ` for hashes in the first place. Having it for arrays too would
be nice, but it isn't as important to me. Having seen some international
keyboard layouts, I think others may find not having to type [] very
useful.
Autovivification of elements is not a problem for pure hashes and
arrays. Autovivification of references (as in "my $ref; $ref`aoeu") and
elements of hybrid arrayhashes (like $0) is also not a problem if you
use the ^-?\d+$ rule to decide. Again: if you need to be explicit, you
still can.
So I'm not sure where it is a problem. Even if deciding based on the
value isn't good and for autovivification you default to hashes, the `
would still be a welcome addition.
> If you can't remember what a data structure looks like, it doesn't matter if
> the code spells out the sequences of hash-array-hash each time - you're
> going to spell it out wrong. People new to Perl and new to data structures
> have this problem all the time - they can't keep straight what the data structure
> *is*.
That, and not many hashes have \d+ keys. When they do, you can just use
{} to make sure things are interpreted the way you want them to be.
> actually go one further and coopt the . operator and emulate JavaScript more
> closely, but I admit the visual distinction between method calls and subscripts
> might warrent the noise.
It's not just the visual distinction, but also to let the parser know.
If I understand correctly, hashes and arrays will have many methods of their
own. I don't want %hash.keys to be interpreted as
%hash{'keys'} and I do want to be able to use the easier syntax when my
hash does in fact have a key 'keys'.
Juerd
