Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon writes:
> Luke Palmer wrote:
> >I admit there's a certain interest to Larry's new idea. I've been
> >looking for more distinction between $, @, and % in Perl 6, since they
> >start to become mostly irrelavent. In the new proposal:
> >
> > my @a = (1,2,3,4,5);
> > my $a = @a;
> >
> > say "@a"; # @a
> > say "$a"; # 1 2 3 4 5 (perhaps?)
>
> I think that's a bad kind of distinction, personally. It breaks an
> obvious parallel.
>
> >But I'll admit that I'm much more a fan of $() and @() than I am of {}.
> >Form.pm would get very angry at this decision indeed.
>
> Amen. Please don't steal unnecessary metacharacters in qq()
> strings--although I still think we should keep it, @ causes a lot of
> problems.
>
> >On the other hand, this is another step unifying strings and regexes. I
> >can say pretty confidently that that's a Good Thing.
>
> The equivalent regex syntax isn't interpolating, even to the extent that
> a bare $foo or @bar is, so this would be sort of a "false cognate"--IMHO
> another reason not to have interpolating {}.
Yeah, I agree with you. I was stretching big time to find the merit in
the idea.
I suppose another good thing is that it makes unneccesary the balanced
brace rule in qq{} that was there in Perl 5: all braces need to be
backwhacked now. However, all braces need to be backwhacked now. Ugh.
I was dreading code-generating heredocs, but with the inclusion of
\qq[], that turns out not to be a problem:
my $code = eval <<'CODE';
sub () {
my \qq[$name] = 0;
...
}
CODE
> >>and what about "@a[1]('arg')[3]"?
> >
> >That probably wouldn't.
>
> Actually, I have to wonder why &foo('bar', 'baz') wasn't on Larry's
> list. Is there a reason for that?
Probably because &foo('bar', 'baz') isn't a function call. All that
does is refer to a function &foo with a siglet ('bar','baz'), which
means either nothing or a syntax error. The function call looks like
foo('bar', 'baz');
> >The New Way (tm) to do that would probably be sticking a role onto the
> >array object with which you're dealing:
> >
> > my @foo does separator('//') = (1,2,3,4,5);
> > say "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"; # 1//2//3//4//5
> >
>
> I would think you'd use a property:
>
> my @foo = (1,2,3,4,5) but separator('//');
>
> [snip]
>
> Roles are nice, but don't forget about the other mechanisms in Perl for
> such things.
Erm, properties *are* roles. Your example is the same as mine.
I was thinking in terms of roles because a role would obviously be the
fellow to modify the stringify method of the array. Attributes work
too, but that all depends on how Array is designed.
Luke
