Jon Ericson wrote:
>
> Perl6 RFC Librarian wrote:
>
> [snip reconstructionist history and newer-is-better fallacy]
>
> > I argue in this Brave New World the distinction between C<$x>, C<@x> and
> > C<%x> are no longer useful and should be abolished. We might want
> > to use all kinds of array objects, why should @x be special? Rather
> > since there are infinitely many kinds of variable let's take the perl6
> > opportunity to make things simple and just use C<$x> for everything.
>
> But @ and % provide important context clues (if not to perl than
> certainly for programmers). We could also eliminate the plural case in
> English, but this would be endlessly confusing for native speaker
> (err... speakers). Why not change @x so that it can represent other
> types of arrays? For instance:
>
> my @x; # standard Perl array
> my @y[2, 3]; # 2x3 matrix (syntax guess)
> my FIFO @z; # FIFO stack (another guess)
or one could just *use* english plurals...
my $speaker = 'Jim';
my $speakers = ('Fred','Bill','Sally','Betty');
my $male_speakers = $speakers[0:1]; # If perl supported this style of range - see RFC
coming soon
# BUT:
my $image = read_huge_2d_list_of_numbers('file');
my $favorite_pixels = $image[10:20,50:100];
my $best_pixel = $image[11,55];
Karl
