On 7/21/04, Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon wrote:
>Amen. Please don't steal unnecessary metacharacters in qq()
>strings--although I still think we should keep it, @ causes a lot of
>problems.
That's why my suggestion would be to use a character that already has a
special meaning in double-quoted strings: ". Well, we probably need a bit
more than that, so maybe "~ and ~" for scalar context or ", and ," for list
context, or some such. No new metacharacters and you could put just about
anything -- hashes, subs, small island nations -- inside the "~...~"!
Actually, I've been pondering this incessant urge to interpolate -- I have
to admit, I suffer from it as much as anyone, but when I ask myself why, I
can't come up with a good answer. Being able to stick a simple $foo in a
string is great, but sometimes I catch myself interpolating when, uh,
extrapolating would not only be much more readable, but occasionally it
would even mean less typing.
At any rate, I'm leaning more and more to the sparse, simple proposals (the
ones that I might actually be able to remember). Normally, I'm all for
cramming everything into The Core(TM) up to and including Sinks::Kitchen on
the grounds that if you don't like it, you don't hafta use it. However,
this doesn't apply to the rules for interpolation because even if I decide
that I'll never interpolate anything anywhere, I still have to remember
what all the rules are so I don't forget to escape the right things.
Hm, every time I go to post this, I think of something else. Now I'm
recognising that I've been labouring under a false dichotomy: we don't have
to have simple rules for interpolation OR complex rules. This is Perl, why
can't we have both ways to do it?
q// -- no interpolation
qq// -- moderate interpolation: $foo, @bar[$none], %bat«man»
qqq// -- ultimate interpolation: anything not A-z0-9 has a special meaning =)
Except it's probably qi instead of qqq, or maybe qq does lots of
interpolation and the new guy does less. And q, qq, qqq, ', ", <<, etc.
are probably all just abbreviations for "quote :various :interp :adverbs"
anyway.
I was also going to say something tongue-in-cheek about Unicode quotation
marks, but curly-quotes could actually be quite useful. They're a
twistier, more complex version of plain old straight quotes, but most
interestingly they come in left-handed and right-handed versions. So you
might nest them to indicate alternating literal and interpolated values.
Erm... or maybe not. But I'm sure there's some way to put them to good use.
- David ³wondering how likely curly-quotes are to come out right² Green
