On Wed, Aug 16, 2000 at 05:34:51PM -0400, Karl Glazebrook wrote:
> > You appear to arguing that expressions in function argument lists should
> > not be evaluated in a list context. Is this really what you mean?
>
> I guess I do. I guess I just hate contexts!
Context is a fundemental part of Perl. If you take out context, you
don't have Perl any more. I'm not certain what you have, but it will
be a quite different language.
Perl 6 will be PERL 6. A Perl 5 expert should not feel as if she is
learning a whole new language when she starts using it. If you want
to create a whole new language that is almost, but not entirely,
unlike Perl, I think that this is not the correct place for it.
> If a function does stuff to lists it should take a list prototype.
This is certainly not the case in Perl 5. I suppose this could
change.
Of course this would mean that every single Perl program in the world
would need to be rewritten in order to work with Perl 6. This isn't
the sort of thing you can do automatically, either.
I really don't understand why you seem to want to make Perl 6 into
something that bears no resemblance to Perl 5. This feels like
saying that the C9X standard should have made C into something like
Haskell, or that the Java 1.4 standard should turn that language
into a LISP clone. If you didn't like the language in the first
place, why do you care what the next version is like?
- Damien
