[Sorry, sent this to the wrong list by mistake.]
Matthew Zimmerman wrote:
Juerd wrote:
Kurt skribis 2005-06-20 19:46 (-0400):
On 6/20/05, Juerd wrote:
Or you can just get your "self" with a simple (module that does)
macro self () { '$?SELF' }
And you could do the same for `./`.
Certainly.
However, there has proven to be much demand for something like ./method,
and in such cases, having it by default is probably the best thing.
I personally don't think it's either necessary or too much. I care about
.method using $_, and many other people care about having short syntax
for self.method too. ./method was something that would work for me, so I
shared that idea, and it was generally accepted.
Apart from the personal joy of seeing something I invented become part
of the official language, I don't really care if ./method is eventually
part of Perl 6 or not. I have always named my invocants, and don't mind
continue to do so. On the other hand, if there is a shorthand, I will
use it, because regardless of whether you think it's pretty or ugly, and
regardless of whether you think it looks enough like a method call,
having a short two character operator for this is in fact very
convenient.
Could we revisit the idea of using a shorter keyword for $?SELF, like
'o'? I know that $Larry said the idea was "probably" not going to work:
http://tinyurl.com/7baz6
but I'm curious if the reasoning that killed it then still holds now,
now that './' has emerged as a replacement.
Count me among the './' dissenters, too. The virtual explosion of new
operators in Perl 6 has not concerned me too much, as I don't envision
myself using many of them, but the operation that './' does is something
I do very frequently. I'm just imaging a lot of my Perl 5 code like:
if ( $self->unit_id == $s2->unit_id ) {
$self->add_component(
$self->_fraction * $self->concentration +
$s2->_fraction * $s2->concentration
);
$self->update;
}
replaced with:
if ( $.unit_id = $s2.unit_id ) {
./add_component(
./:fraction * ./concentration +
$s2.:fraction * $s2.concentration
);
./update;
}
and it gives me the willies. If I have a complicated mathematical
expression with method calls in it (which happens a lot for me), the '/'
part of './' in particular gives me lots of visual problems.
I'll put
macro o () { '$?SELF' }
at the top of my code if I have to, but I want to make one last gasp at
getting $Larry / @Larry to reconsider this.
--
Matt
Matthew Zimmerman
Interdisciplinary Biophysics, University of Virginia
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~mdz4c/
