Damien Neil wrote:
>
> On Tue, Aug 15, 2000 at 05:45:04PM -0400, Karl Glazebrook wrote:
> > I hope people will actually read the RFC before coming back with these
> > canned responses which I (and presumably everyone else on this list)
> > am completely familiar with. I used to believe that too! Honest...
>
> I think you do a significant disservice to brush off criticism so
> blithely. Complaining that anyone who disagrees with you has not read
> the RFC is unlikely to garner much support.
It was the response which was blithe, it just re-iterated arguments we
are all completely familar with and did not address my point in the RFC.
> Line noise or not, I like the type prefixes.
Great. I don't like them.
> snrub($a);
> snrub(@a);
> snrub(%a);
> snrub(@$a)
> snrub(%$a)
>
> Each one of these does something different. I know, just by looking
> at the expression, with absolutely no further knowledge of what the
> function and variable involved are, the general nature of what is
> going on. I know whether the function is receiving one argument or
> several. I can make reasonable assumptions about what will happen
> to the contents of the variable. I know something about what
> operations I can perform on the variable.
and this is supposed to be good?
presumably snrub() has a first line like my($apples, $oranges, $price)=@_
and it would be far clearer to call it that way.
> Perhaps we should remove context? Sure, you won't be able to test
> for @a == 5 any more, but we can just rewrite that as $a->length == 5.
> At this point, there isn't much need for the $, though, so we
> can just say a->length == 5. That -> is ugly, though; maybe we can
> turn it into a . like the rest of the world, at which point we're
> every bit as good as Python!
>
> Y'know, I like Python. Lot of nice things in that language. Maybe
> we should all jump over to their mailing lists rather than wasting
> our time with Perl 6.
Python is really nice and we should endeavour to learn why a lot of people
like it so much rather than telling them 'good riddance'.
Karl
