On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 11:19 PM, Doug McNutt <dougl...@macnauchtan.com>wrote:
> I confess. I'm here because I hoped perl 6 would do vector operations > after reading an early small book. I don't think anyone has said that it won't/can't. Perl 6 indeed returns a scalar... but that scalar may be a container of some kind, including a vector if such a container type has been defined. (Think perl5's refs, only managed automatically instead of making the programmer manually convert between refs and referenced.) Even FORTRAN doesn't actually pass or return arbitrarily sized arrays. It passes pointers around instead; you just can't see them or touch them directly --- but there are ways to *abuse* them, such as the infamous hack that lets you change the value of a "literal" number because of the representation that has to be used for them just in case they're passed to or returned from a function. Perl6 normally hides this kind of as well, but if for some reason you need to, you can get at the underlying machinery, so the existence of that machinery is admitted instead of being hidden and occasionally coughing up bizarre dust bunnies.) -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allber...@gmail.com ballb...@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net
