On 10/21/05, Benjamin Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 06:39:34PM -0600, Luke Palmer wrote:
> > Huh? So you want to go back to Perl 5's arrow? *Anybody* coming to
> > Perl 6 from some non-Perl 5 language is going to be more comfortable
> > with dot.
>
> Unless it was Smalltalk, C++, Haskell etc.
>
> I really wish people wouldn't use the argument that . is used for method
> calls everywhere. It's not.
Well, you know, for this kind of argument I would generally agree with
you. But I think in this case, I won't. The reasoning is a little
shakey, but I think it still works.
Smalltalk uses whitespace, therefore making it *the* fundamental
syntactic operation (like function application in Haskell). Since our
fundamental operation is not method call, it doesn't count.
C++ uses dot half the time.
Haskell doesn't really have methods. They're just functions. We
aren't taking that conceptual route, so Haskell doesn't count either.
Dot is probably the most semantically consistent character of modern
programming languages, second only to perhaps parentheses.
Luke
