On Fri, Apr 16, 2004 at 01:17:10PM -0700, Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon wrote:
> I don't claim that they won't be used often. I claim that the *best*
> solution is to fix the syntax we already have, not add more. Failing
> that, we should make sure that the syntax we add is as globally useful
> as possible. The form of backticks you're proposing are good for only
> one thing: indexing hashes (and possibly arrays). Clever definition of
> the colon operator, or creation of a bareword-quoting operator, would
> allow you to use "barewords" anywhere you wanted to.
Hmm. Who's to say that ` isn't the bareword-quoting operator?
(This is where Larry chimes in with "*I* say it isn't so" :-)
I'm not sure what fixing the existing syntax would mean. A big
advantage of %hash`foo for me is that the delimiters (all 4 of them)
are gone. Can you "fix" the syntax and remove the delimiters? I think
these things are irreconcilable in your universe (since you seem to
want to keep the curlies)
> The complications I see are in things like:
>
> To get an item out of a hash, you can write %varname{"key"}.
> You can also write %varname<<key>> if there aren't any spaces in
> the key. Finally, if the key doesn't have any characters in it
> except for letters, numbers and underscores, you can write
> %varname`key.
Except that you've put things in this explanation that shouldn't be
there IMHO. The %varname<<key>> is a special case, but not of "getting a
single item from a hash", rather it's a special case of a one element
list generated from << >> evaluating to the element. So, if you remove
that bit, it's the same as the two below just with different syntax.
> Compare that to (assuming barewords are allowed in hash indexers):
>
> To get an item out of a hash, you can write %varname{"key"}. If
> the key doesn't have any characters in it except for letters,
> numbers, and underscores, you can write %varname{key}.
>
> Or, with the colon proposal:
>
> To get an item out of a hash, you can write %varname{"key"}. If
> the key doesn't have any characters in it except for letters,
> numbers, and underscores, you can write %varname{:key}.
>
> Which explanation is shorter? Which is more logical? Which has the
> fewest special cases?
All of them! The last two seem to imply that %hash<<foo>> will be
going away and it doesn't look like it will at all. To be fair each
of those descriptions should mention %hash<<foo>> if the first one
does.
> I'm going to throw in one more argument at this point. It's based on a
> game you all played as children: Which One Of These Doesn't Belong?
>
> &stuff(1)
> @stuff[1]
> %stuff{1}
> %stuffï1ï
> %stuff`1
I have nothing to say to this other than "so what?" Really, does it
matter that much? Are delimiters really that important here?
-Scott
--
Jonathan Scott Duff
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
