----- Original Message ----
> From: Patrick R. Michaud <pmich...@pobox.com>
> > I would expect this to be roughly equivalent to:
> >
> > for @array { $_ .= trim; }
> >
> > For an array of hashes, this would result in each hash element
> > of @array being replaced with a reference to an array of the
> > trimmed string representation of the hash.
>
> Oops -- I over-referenced here. The corrected form:
>
> For C< @array».=trim >, each element of @array would be replaced
> with its trimmed string representation. If @array starts out
> as an array of hashes, then @array».=trim would leave @array
> with the trimmed stringification of each hash element.
I don't get this. If I can't call @array.trim, I certainly can't call
%hash.trim. If you mean stringify the hash and then trim *that*, what does
that mean? We get that all the time in Perl 5 and I've written tests to catch
things like HASH(0x80631d0) showing up in templates. This is probably some of
the most useless behavior in Perl 5 and I don't want to see it propagate to
Perl 6. Either that should die violently or it should do something useful and
I'm unsure of what would be useful here.
A hash is basically a set of pairs. You *can't* trim the keys because they're
supposed to be unique. Otherwise, what does it mean to trim { ' foo' => 1,
'foo ' => 2 }? So we can only trim values, but what if the values are pairs?
Then wouldn't you effectively be apply the hyperop recursively throughout the
data structure? That might be expensive and have unwanted side-effects ("what
do you mean my hash had a reference to your ORM data?").
Cheers,
Ovid
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