On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 11:20:39PM +0200, Ilmari Vacklin wrote:
: On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 12:05:30PM -0800, Larry Wall wrote:
: > On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 11:53:26AM -0800, Larry Wall wrote:
: > : Also, if we provide a way to return a pair instead of a value from a
: > : hash (currently done with the new :%hash<key> syntax),
: >
: > Whoops, I forgot I changed that to %hash:<key> (and %hash:{'key'} too).
:
: Playing the devil's advocate; maybe that should be %hash.pairs<key>, or
: %hash.pair:key? I don't like the : there - it's too small, and hidden
: %between the larger syntactical elements.
Leaving aside the visibility argument, which is a valid complaint,
%hash.pairs implies generation of a list of pairs which can't be
subscripted except by treating it as a hash. Whether you put
.pairs (or .kv) before or after the subscript, it ends up being a
special case. So it seems to be more of an adverbial idea, but I
thought
%hash<key>:pair
is rather ugly, and prone to having :pair eat up the following syntax.
We could improve the visibility of the colon like this:
%hash.:<key>
or maybe even
%hash :<key>
On the other hand, the colon notation doesn't give us .kv. But it's
probably not too bad to say
%hash.:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
in that case. I thought a bit about adverbial solutions like:
%hash{:pair @slice}
%hash{:kv @slice}
but it is problematic to extend those to:
%hash<:pair key>
%hash<:kv key>
And it seems to me that we very frequently will want to pass named
arguments that take their names from the keys of the hash:
blurp 1,2,3, %options:<foo bar baz>
and I wanted to get the named-arg indicator as near as I could to
the actual argument names without destroying the <> quoting.
Larry
